competitor building spammy links to my site with query strings

I just noticed that someone has been putting a lot of effort into taking out one of the websites that I work for by building a bunch of spammy links that point to my site with a query string appended to the link which may create duplicate content issues because the query string doesn't actually do anything. I remember reading about this a while back. There was a bug in MSN and you could remove your competitors by doing this. It also might be creating a duplicate content issue because these pages with the query strings at the end are getting indexed as separate pages.

The site has been in the top 3 for a certain anchor text in the big 3 SEs until recently and I think this black-hat activity by one of my competitors is adversely affecting the site. The problem is I can't find any of the articles that addressed how to remedy this.

My options are I could do some url removals for the problem query string urls in Google and Yahoo or block them with robots.txt or do a redirect. I'm not sure I want to do a redirect, however, because that might allow the spammy links to count which probably won't help and may hurt.

Does anyone know what to do in this situation?
Thanks.

 

I would do a massive link campaign for your competitors url, using negative kw, and also continue to build your links. You can also report the activity to the se's but it may fall on deaf ears. Often BH activity needs to be fought with BH efforts...
good luck!

 

I don't think it would be worth the time and money to do that especially if there is a way to fix this which I'm pretty sure there is. I'm not sure that the SEs would be able to do anything about it since they are already aware of this but they would have to manually exclude every single page where a link is on which is not really their style.

 

Just use a robots.txt file to block out the urls with qstrings they are linking to.

 

Don't stress too much. Like the others have said, use robots.txt and you could set your .htaccess to fire off a 404 when those query strings are used. That will eliminate them from search engines sooner or later. It can't hurt you too much in the long run. Just keep working on building links to your site, and you'll be fine.

 

Why block it if you can use it.
Simply redirect everything with a query string (301) to the original URL and be happy about the link building he does for you.
The SE will only index those pages and even better count the incoming links towards that page.

 

I got no comment but this Post really useful to me. I really don't understand these BH Seo.

 

Not the best plan. Whatever value the competitor achieves (for the wrong keywords) for those duplicate pages will be passed on. You don't want that. You want to stick with a 404.

You never want to use a redirect on a bad page. You want to get rid of those with a 404 error code. You only want to redirect pages (301 only) that are ranking well for something.

 

it worked in MSN a couple of months back but it doesn't work anymore, MSN fixed the bug....it never worked in google or yahoo...

 

I'd have to disagree here WebGeek182, there's absolutely no way you can be penalised for the back-links, but you could be penalised for the duplicate content, so I would suggest the best approach is to gain what you can from these free back-links without getting any of the negative dup-content effects.

A 301 redirect would achieve this.

Alternatively, if you want to go along WebGeek's lines, how about 301 redirecting the spammy URLs back to your competitors site?

 

Matt Cutts and others have said that if they catch on to spammy linkbuilding, it can count against you. Usually it takes a lot if you are an established site. MSN definitely penalizes for backlinks when they do a human review of a flagged site; I've communicated with them on this. Based on the TrustRank algorithm, which may apply a dampening filter when there are links from low-trust sites, I think I'm just going to stick with the robots.txt block and I did the url removal in Google and Yahoo.

301 redirecting the spammy urls back to the competitor who i think is doing it is very tempting however although risky since it creates an association between the client site and the one it's redirecting to.

Thanks for all your answers.

 

Another BH tactic you could do is to use "ripoff report" and other business review sites to give him reviews about his business tactics. Then you could get these pages some link juice and have them rank for his company name. This is only a concept of course.

-D

 

I agree with Dal and WebGeek182. Stay on the right path.

 

I stand corrected (some green is on the way).

 

I wouldn't need to return a 404 error if I've blocked it with robots.txt and removed the urls though, right?

 

Actually you do need to return a 404...Read this from the Google Webmaster guidelines.

Thanks Andre...no worries...just here to help.

Obviously you don't understand what's going on here. A lot of people chant the mantra "You can never be hurt by incoming links...You can never be hurt by incoming links..." Unfortunately that's just not true. This is one example where you can, because IT IS CREATING DUPLICATE CONTENT by using the query strings to create spammy url's. I've seen this before. You have to serve a 404 to show that they don't exist, and get them out of the search engines. Having extra (useless or duplicate) pages in the index actually will bring your site lower rankings on the whole. I've seen this many times too. One client of mine had bad SEO's before us, and they created a whole array of spammy pages. I took them off his site and the NEXT day, his rankings shot up - for every page of his site. (Context: Site had been around for a while so it had cleared all the Google aging filters - most won't have this drastic a result with a brand new site, but older sites will see major difference.)

Again, bad advice. As Brian R2 said, never create an association with a site like that.

That's actually a great idea - that could work. Good thinking, Dal.