Help! I Am Being Attacked By Bad Neighbourhoods!
Bad neighbourhoods: They can be detrimental to your site if they are not dealt with properly. I am currently having trouble with my site because I recently found some very disturbing sites with mass links, some of those pointing to my site. I am deeply concerned with this because it may affect my rankings in Google (and other search engines) - they may see I am being linked by bad neighbourhoods and stop indexing (even if I never sent or asked to be linked to those sites).
Getting Rid Of The Problem: This is why I would much rather deal with spam blogs than actual sites…I usually leave a message to the site owner and it is dealt with. But these are actual sites and there is no contact page! I will be dealing with this issue very soon however, I’ll be trying to contact the owner’s of the sites to find out exactly what is going on, in addition to this I will send a spam report to Google informing them of the existence of these sites. They will then hopefully de-index these site, the other problem is that some of these sites are in another language - which makes it even more difficult for me to contact the site owner.
Why Am I Being Targeted? I am not the only one being targeted…there are huge amounts of spam linking occurring right now all over the Internet. The unfortunate thing is that we cannot control the sites that decide to do the malicious things, the best course of action to take is to send a spam report to Google and inform them, you may also want to try and do the same with other search engines like Yahoo and AOL.
Contacting The Site Owners: I have made the effort to contact all the bad neighbourhood sites and kindly asked them to remove the link from their site. If you are ever in this situation, it is advisable to do the same thing, and if this does not work, report the site as a spam site to Google and other search engines. I hope this helps.
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Posted in Small Fish Big Money News
Hi,
I have the same issue and you have no chance to deal with that. I lost my whole traffic from Google for several days and it returns very slowly. The only chance is to wait for a change of the Google formula. They will have to react.
Luke
I have had some issues similar to this with one of my pages where I did a writeup of a local online classified ad service. Apparently the “classified ad” keywords in the title attracted some spammers who were trawling thorough the SERPs looking for places to post their quasi-spammy ads. Occasionally I will receive comments to this particular page in the form of rather lengthy classified ads essentially consisting of product lists and contact information. Most of the time the URL field is left blank.
Meanwhile, about three months ago I was looking at my stats in Webmaster tools and noticed that Google had recorded a relatively high number of links to this particular page. When I checked where the links were coming from, I noticed that they were coming from sites that were essentially garbage — I am still unsure of their original purpose. Most of them had a few pornographic images at the top, but they were not really porn sites; they had some gibberish text underneath the images in the form of long lines of hyphens and other symbols. When I moused over some of this gibberish, I eventually noticed that there was a link to my page buried in there, along with links to many other sites.
As far as I know, this has not affected my position in the SERPs. From what I have read in the SEO literature, Google and the other search engines do not penalize a site merely because “bad neighborhood” sites link to them. They can, however, penalize sites that actually link out to the bad neighborhoods.
After thinking about this, we can realize that this makes sense logically. We cannot control who links to us — if it was possible to receive penalties just because of a few “bad” inbound links, black hat SEO would be ridiculously easy and businesses would be knocking each other out of the search engines left and right. This is not to say that black hatters cannot get a site penalized temporarily - it is possible, but this takes some pretty drastic actions, and a legitimate site owner who becomes a victim of such tactics can usually file a successful re-inclusion request and get the problems sorted out in the long run.
Like many others, I have also been a victim of these kind of spam links. It’s frustrating because as a freelancer, you really don’t have the time to take out of your day to deal with these problems but of course you have to find a way to do it anyway.
Would love to know more about the Google spam report since I’m just starting to learn the ins and outs of dealing with these problems. Gonna have to make a note to look that up today!
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