Hi.Please. Is there any way to mark or event block undesired links to my website?I read something about farm links and staff in the Internet, and would like to exert some control over people linking to my site.Is it possible?Thanks very much and congratulations for this great forum.Marc
people don't just link to you for nothing. sometimes people would link to you is when there is satisfaction issue and people review your product and service providing a link to the site/product. even tho you are getting a backlink, this type of links hurts your credibility. since you don't have any control over 3rd party sites linking to you, you can't remove the links. you can contact the site owner and request the link to be removed but you are at the mercy of the site owner in this type of situation.
Exactly! Google just wont give you credit for this kind of links. You have nothing to worry about. You can also contact the webmasters of sites that you don't want to link to you and ask them to remove your link or to add the no-follow to your link.
Hi MarcJohnson. There has been much debate on this issue over the last years. It is not just a problem of competitors trying to harm your site, but a question of getting control of something that affects your site. Imagine a change in your link policy over the time, because you have improved your knowledge of SEO techniques and practices, or because you hired the service of a so-called “professional†that has finally resulted in a disappointment. In any case, Matt Cutts addressed this issue in this video, and literally: "No, we don't currently offer that as a feature": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4dAWb5jUws
If it's because of a negative review, firstly address any deficiency in your site/service/product if the complaint is relevant. You might get a take-down/retraction of the page/complaint that way. Otherwise, start a positive reputation SEO campaign. Outrank them for the search terms the reviews are being found under. (If you don't know them, analyse the page and guess, then search to find out.) Whether you outrank with your own site, guest posts, reviews by other people, etc. Just aim to get them off the first page. Even blog about it, backlink to the negative review and explain how it's inaccurate. There are always two sides to a story, so let yours be heard. Even if it's to say a problem has been identified and rectified (it's better to do this than stay silent). If that's not what you meant and you're worried about spammy links, etc, then don't as they won't exist unless you make them.
According to the Matt Cutts video - no one is protected. So if I'm linking from porn sites to a competitor - he's sunk. That's a crazy policy.
No, that's not the case. While the links can't be flagged, he clearly does state that someone trying to harm another site is considered in the algorithm/code. So, it's doubtful that it would sink a competitor, seems more like the links would be discounted (no value). Therefore, they could exist or not and the site would remain the same.
Actually, links can hurt you, for example, a site that wants to hurt a new site and will send him link farms, porn, etc. This might get him sand boxed, however as you get yourself more and more links, and optimize your site, Google will quickly understand that it's a false negative and your site has value. Eventually, you do have control over bad linkage, and that is by leveraging them with good linkage. Hope that makes sense.
Very true, they could end up sandboxed, but it could be a lot of links from anywhere. People do this all the time from non-harmful sites. They just build in an unnatural way.
I don't know that there is a concrete way to deal with this. Unless you contact every site that's linked to you and ask them to remove your site. I'm sure you're not the first one to deal with this. Hopefully, you won't be penalized for something out of your control. Good luck.
This may be a dumb suggestion but is it possible to redirect or block a visitor from a certain domain? Including robots? If you know where your undesirable links are coming from then surely there is some sort of redirect or blocking code that could be inserted to htaccess or similar and remove the influence these links hold to your site. If it's possible to block from countries or IPs then surely this is possible?
I remember this kind of action is called Google bowling. It was applied against George Bush Government few years ago. Now, Google is more careful about it and does not make bad effect on your site I think.
It's possible to block specific user-agents, referrers, IPs, etc, with .htaccess, so yes you could block people coming from specific links, but why? And are people likely to visit from there? And it can easily be gotten around (just copy and paste the link into the browser address bar). Even if the purpose is for redirecting an SEbot, where will you send them to or block them altogether? It could potentially have a negative impact.
I wholeheartedly agree with you ryan_uk I was just offering my suggestion to help with the OPs question. I personally cannot think of any possible reason I would want to block people coming from specific links but this is what I would look into if I was going to try.
This matter is really very difficult to understand, my site was penalized for doing link building and without link building it was in top 4 when I started building links it is dropped and nowhere it can be found so what is the reason?