Welcome to the Q&A Forum

thanks, Alex. You make some good points.

My site is built in Wordpress. Somebody has built spammy pharma links to hundreds of non-existent pages. I don't know whether this was inspired by malice or an attempt to inject spammy content.

Many of the non-existent pages have the suffix .pptx. These now all return 403s. Example: https://www.101holidays.co.uk/tazalis-10mg.pptx

A smaller number of spammy links point to regular non-existent URLs (not ending in .pptx). These are given 302s by Wordpress to my homepage. I've disavowed all domains linking to these URLs.

I have not had a manual action or seen a dramatic fall in Google rankings or traffic. The campaign of spammy links appears to be historical and not ongoing.

Questions:

1. Do you think these links could be damaging search performance? If so, what can be done? Disavowing each linking domain would be a huge task.

2. Is 403 the best response? Would 404 be better?

3. Any other thoughts or suggestions?

Thank you for taking the time to read and consider this question.

Mark

How often do you see them in the SERPS?

Not so much? There's your answer, then!

Is it worth getting links from Suite101 post-Panda?

They claim to have tidied up. But what does Google think?

I really can't see any reason for adding nofollow tags to these links. They are trusted sites, after all. And all that stuff about PageRank sculpting has been discredited now. Keep building the page - I'm going to bookmark it!

I agree with Steve. I would add that it makes sense that you could mark yourself as an author across various niches and sectors. After all, very few of us are interested in only one subject. Many of us have some expertise in multiple fields. So to limit authors to a single subject would be counter-intuitive and contrary to the way the world works. I don't believe Google wants to do that.

I would look for sites that are specific to your industry. You might find these through Twitter, or by using advanced search operators in Google, such as:

intitle:"guest post" AND [your keyword]

Lots of questions here. I wouldn't assume that your #1 position is secure. So rather than ask why, I would be working to shore up its position by establishing more quality signals, such as earning some links from high-authority sites and setting up Google authorship on the site.

Links from Pinterest are followed, so they may have SEO benefit. However, the fact that they are so easy to create suggests that Google would not want to give them the same credit as an earned link.

I don't think that should influence your decision about whether or not to use Pinterest. It probably depends on your business. I know somebody that sells quirky stationery online and finds that Pinterest generates a lot of sales. My sector is travel and - although travel images are popular on Pinterest - traffic generated tends to be minimal. Give it a whirl and see how it works for you.

You might want to use your analytics data to find the variations of terminology that your visitors use to find your pages, then use those variations in page titles, given that you're selling primarily one type of product.

Good plan. I would wait at least 4 weeks after removing the link before you decide whether or not it's worked

see my answer below!

I agree in part with easyrider2. There may be a problem caused by the sitewide header links from your own blog (blog.printsasia.com). These currently use the keyword-rich anchor text "Online Bookshop UK", although I suspect you previously had this as "Bookshop UK", as this is what OSE has picked up. Either way, they look like the kind of links that might be targeted by Penguin, as they don't use your brand name as anchor text.

If the blog was a subdomain of your UK site (blog.printsasia.co.uk), I don't think this would be a problem. But because it's a subdomain of a US site (albeit the same company), this could look like a spammy type of link.

Note: it may be that Google has not penalised you, but has simply decided to discount a set of links, perhaps these ones.

The good news is that as this is your company blog you can quickly change the link.

You could try one of the following:

1. Remove the sitewide link from blog.printsasia.com altogether

2. Change the anchor text to your brand name (eg Printsasia UK)

3. Remove the sitewide link and add a few more "natural" links into blog posts (as easyrider2 suggests)

Personally, I would try 1, assuming it doesn't drive significant traffic to your site. If that helps then you know you've identified a problem.

However, I don't think this is your only problem, and I'm not even convinced it is a problem. Looking at your link profile, you simply don't have sufficient volume or diversity of links, nor do you have enough links from high-authority sites within your space. So even if you "fix" this immediate problem, you still need to focus on some serious linkbuilding (by which I mean relationship building) within your industry.

I agree with easyrider2 about the spammy blog comments. These may not cause a problem with Google but they look very poor to users (and webmasters who might potentially link to your sites).

yes, great timing! I think Matt said in his webmaster video that disavowing will also take a few weeks. Please let us know how you get on. Good luck!

Ah. Well, at least you got a reply!

Geoff, you probably need to be a little more patient. You only registered your domain on 20 June this year and there's nothing yet on the Wayback Machine. I would focus your energies more on creating great content on your site, social media outreach, etc, rather than worrying about your domain authority just yet.

I'm seeing it less and less in the travel space. But when it does happen I agree that it's hugely frustrating. You simply have to keep on doing the right thing in the firm belief that Google will reward you in the end. Don't be tempted to copy spammy techniques because (a) you'll probably suffer in the long run, and (b) it might not actually be those that are causing your competitors to outrank you.

Have you tried a webspam report?

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en