BIG NEWS: External links harm your site in Google SERPS So it looks like someone is being malicious to a few of my websites, they are building lots of porn and SPAM linsk to my sites I only noticed this when I looked at my webmaster tools account and noticed the links had jumped by a large amount. I was checking WMT because I had dropped for a few major keywords. This is very worrying that Google now lowers SERPS rankings from external activity. As it seems to have happened for more than one of my sites I am certain its not an isolated incident. So it seems like there is an option for anyone to be malicious to their competition. This cant be right an it? I am tempted to try this out on a random site and publish my findings, very worrying. I am seeing hundreds of links being linked to my sites on a daily basis, forums and random junk pages. Anyone else experienced this?
I am not doubting your your observations on your statistics. However, if this were true, we could knock our competition down the ranks by doing the same thing. It must be something else. If you don't feel that you are doing anything wrong, then why not put in a request for reconsideration. What do you have to lose?
I dont think this is a reconsideration issue as my serps have only slipped at the most 15 positions for the ones being spammed. "we could knock our competition down the ranks by doing the same thing" This is what I think is being done to me, now imagine what damage others could do with such techniques. I am very surprised Google has let this happen. I have seen things happen like this when we have done article marketing, where you drop for a few hours/days before coming back in higher positions, but never a drop or punishment for what would appear to be mass spam links. I would have expected that Google would simply ignore them. Today and in the pas we see hundreds of sites scraping our pages and dumping snippits on to their own sites, this has only ever affected us in small ways and Google seems to be ontop of it. How do you report something like this to Google? Its not simply spam its malicious and seems to be a problem with the google Algo? Thoughts anyone?
It might be your competition if you are placed higher and they feel a threat. You cant do a lot about that. I would change you on page keywords slightly just to rule this out. how many backlinks that are "spammy" points directly to your domain
Well this is really sad. Yahoo site explorer gives you the option to mark a backlink as spam. So google may also have that option. Or you can directly communicate with google regarding the issue and they should sort it out.
G is not lowering SERPs, at least not permanently. You are seeing G's normal reaction to a sudden, large increase in BLs. It is G's defense mechanism. There are many reasons why a site may get lots of links suddenly. It could have been in the news, it could have done a press release, it could have been on TV, and so on. Or, the site owner may have purchased links. Or, a competitor could be trying to trash the site. G will 'quarantine' the site until some evidence comes in that points to what the true cause is. So. . . it is temporary. It could be 30 days before your site is back, but it will be back. In the meantime you should *not* do any SEO. Do not mess with on-page optimization or do anything that is not normal. If you do, this will signal that *you* are the likely reason for all of the new links. If that is G's conclusion, your site will not recover.
Not the external links made you lose positions its the place where they came from. It might actually be just a google dance.
This is disturbing to me, maybe you should report this to Google so they know this kind of thing is happening..
100 malicious links to your site will harm you if you only have 10 back links. 100 malicious links to your site will NOT harm you if you have more than 10K back links.
Wow, calm down. LOL Ok, so give us your website name and lets do a little test? I think I have found a service that might replicate some of this spam. DoDo Me: One of my sites has over 40k links and over 1 million uniques a month. But I am seeing in excess of 1k links of spam every few days! This is madness!
intersting find. i thing this must be communicated to google , so they can take corrective measures for the innocent ...
i think you got a point here . but that is not in your hand to stop someone to bog you down with their malacious intent ....
If this is true, then many people can use this technique to beat their competitor. I think it might affect but depend on the ratio.
Yea I really don't think this could happen easily. If a few bad links could hurt a site then I would take down my competitors. I think they must have spammed you in the thousands