I was on Google's Top5 for a search term that had 65M results. I held that position for almost 3 years. Somewhere between 3-6 months ago, my site just disappeared, not even on Top100. After doing some research, I've noticed that there were a few hundred or more new backlinks all from blackhat websites. All of the links had anchor text of celebrities and some adult related text. I'm assuming that this was done by a competitor (why would anyone else go through the trouble). My concern is that I thought there are safeguards against this sort of thing, but maybe not. I thought backlinks can only do good? What can I do to undo the damage?
My My I have been waiting for long to see this kind of report. Although - I have known this thing is actually possible - this is the first report I have seen to vindicate my belief. I also have couple of sites which were penalized long-time back and later on discovered backlinks coming from guestbooks/XXX related content pages which were handiwork of ................. There has been lots of discussion in the SEO world (specially webmasterworld forum) about competitors being sabotaged. But everybody believed there are enough safeguards against this - which is not. Too bad!
hey i m also wondering how can i prevent those blacklisted backlinks to my site.. ...Any information on prevention would be appreciated with thanks...
IMHO, i really believe that a competitor can't hurt your website ranking by linking to it from bad neighborhoods And to be honest, we all know beside of Google that a webmaster can't have control of other websites linking to his/him own website.. instead you only have control over your own site.. However, Too MANY links with the same anchor text might hurt your ranking BUT no body knows for sure what's considered as MANY by Google? So, my advice is to check for other violations within your own site like: Duplicated Content, Keyword Stuffing, Text Hiding and Properly Cloaking / Doorway Pages... You can always request a reconsideration via Google Webmasters Tools, and it used to work before like charm.. Hope i was clear and helpful, REP is most appreciated
wp-themes stop begging for rep in each post you make. I'm tempted to give you -rep for that. Also I'm not sure why you dispute such obvious evidence. mcmuney you should first contact Google about this issue. If the ranking drop was indeed caused by those shady links, they should be able to reverse the penalty. I don't know if you'd have much success, but perhaps it is worth trying to contact those shady websites to get your links removed. Adding more quality links may help dillute those bad links. If a website has a strong enough link profile, small attacks probably wouldn't have much effect. So just work at improving your link profile and work at gaining more trust from Google.
i think you can report it from google. tell them what happened so they can monitor your site as well.
I think Google do not penalize for backlinks as any competitor can do such thing. Imagine what will happen when people who do not like Google will start to build thousands of backlinks to Google from bad websites? You cannot control who links to you, but what matters is to whom you link to. There must be some other reason for the drop.
i was #1 at few keywords with 4 sites and servage got hacked and didnt fix it while i was broad.. when i got back home i noticed some of my sites wasnt even in the first 4 pages.. OKAY.. and saw one sites title was like nude teen gay money so frustrated! all of the sites had over 100 diffrent links to porn/aff sites
Since there aren't many posts like this, I hope someone just didn't find a leak in the safeguards and open Pandora's box, which can be very damaging to a lot of site owners. It's very frustrating, specially when we're all working so hard to boost ranking and someone can just come along and erase all the hard work and take us back to square one. I just requested a reconsideration, let's see what happens.
Google is often very quick to get back in terms of reconsideration requests. Keep us all updated, as I seriously doubt its due to competitor behaviour... if youve explained the details to Google, they will often come back and detail the reason for the drop in SERPS, that explanation would be most beneficial to the rest of us here, and especially to convince the naysayers that it just cant happen from competitor behaviour - otherwise everyone would be doing it.. I think the term is "Google bowling" or something similar.
I would go into webmaster tools and fill out a spam report. Explain very clearly what you think happened. If it's just then you should see something happen. They probably won't get back to you though.
Googles official stance is something along the lines of "other sites linking to yours cannot harm your rankings" Mid Jan of this year a high ranking site of mine lost serp overnight. The site in question has major keywords that were ranking on the first page of g.co.uk now pushed back 40, 50 and 60 postions. The site had unique content added frequently, no KW stuffing, - it was (still is) a site built and progressed within the guidelines that Google lay down Several days before the site dropped serps several hundred spam links (from just a couple of domains) appeared pointing to my interior pages. This may be coincidence.....maybe not The catch 22 situation is - if Google say other sites linking to yours cannot harm your rankings and I file a reinclusion requestion - the potential reappearance of my site in the serps would suggest that other sites linking to yours may well hurt your rankings, which would open a very large can of worms