How do you know if someone is trying to sabotage your site's rankings?

[jasondinner]

Hey Guys,

How do you know if someone is trying to sabotage your rankings? Here's what's happening...

I have a bunch of sites that rank in google for certain keywords.

They all get traffic, but over the last few days 3 or 4 of them have seen a spike in traffic mainly because, according to analytics, one site is linking to all of them.

But the traffic it is sending is bot traffic. At least it appears that way because the average time on site for traffic from this site is 0:00.

Have any of you had something similar happen to your sites?

Thanks,
Jason

[Evan-M]

Originally Posted by jasondinner

Hey Guys,

How do you know if someone is trying to sabotage your rankings? Here's what's happening...

I have a bunch of sites that rank in google for certain keywords.

They all get traffic, but over the last few days 3 or 4 of them have seen a spike in traffic mainly because, according to analytics, one site is linking to all of them.

But the traffic it is sending is bot traffic. At least it appears that way because the average time on site for traffic from this site is 0:00.

Have any of you had something similar happen to your sites?

Thanks,
Jason

Personally I hear people worry about other people sabotage there site daily...and rarly do I ever confirm it.I work on 5-10 sites a week , and have countless calls to "fix sites". I just check one of my sites, and have 9 bots "online" right this very minute all active in the last 60 seconds, 1 of them came from the warrior forum. Are they trying to sabotage me? No. The bot found and followed a link here.

Its a lot more work to hurt someones rankings than it is to just outrank them, and once you know what you are doing you can get pr5-6 with little effort. And follow logs to block any threats if your really worried about it.

Just my 2 cents, I would take the time your worrying about it, and apply it to seo and site optimization in case someone ever does try, there efforts would go in vein.

[jasondinner]

Originally Posted by Evan-M

Personally I hear people worry about other people sabotage there site daily...and rarly do I ever confirm it.I work on 5-10 sites a week , and have countless calls to "fix sites". I just check one of my sites, and have 9 bots "online" right this very minute all active in the last 60 seconds, 1 of them came from the warrior forum. Are they trying to sabotage me? No. The bot found and followed a link here.

Its a lot more work to hurt someones rankings than it is to just outrank them, and once you know what you are doing you can get pr5-6 with little effort. And follow logs to block any threats if your really worried about it.

Just my 2 cents, I would take the time your worrying about it, and apply it to seo and site optimization in case someone ever does try, there efforts would go in vein.

I hear you Evan. It's just weird that one site out of nowhere, which is totally unrelated to any of my sites, is linking to 8 or 9 of my sites and sending sh*tty useless bot traffic for no apparent reason.

I feel like it's finding out all of my sites through my server or something and it's kind of freaking me out.

I don't know what to make of it.

[Evan-M]

Originally Posted by jasondinner

I hear you Evan. It's just weird that one site out of nowhere, which is totally unrelated to any of my sites, is linking to 8 or 9 of my sites and sending sh*tty useless bot traffic for no apparent reason.

I feel like it's finding out all of my sites through my server or something and it's kind of freaking me out.

I don't know what to make of it.

are they actually linking to all your sites? or linking to one, and the bots are following on page links to the others?...also it could be one of them stupid "scraper" sites grabbing content....linking everywhere. They are really common now.

[jasondinner]

Originally Posted by Evan-M

are they actually linking to all your sites? or linking to one, and the bots are following on page links to the others?

Directly linking to each of the sites.

[Evan-M]

Originally Posted by jasondinner

Directly linking to each of the sites.

Do they have any pr? lol write a php script that detects the referring url, if a bot comes from that page that isn't Google send them on a wild never ending goose chase of a page that links to a page then back lol no other links, and the bot will get stuck there. But at the same time you can pickup the pr from the link lol

[jasondinner]

No the site linking to all of my sites via a bot is junk. I think it's doing it at the server level. How else could it have known I owned all of these sites. They are in different niches.

[Evan-M]

<?php
//modify for problem bots
function is_bot($user_agent)
{
//if no user agent is supplied then assume it's a bot
if($user_agent == "")
return 1;

//array of bot strings to check for
$bot_strings = Array( "google", "bot",
"yahoo", "spider",
"archiver", "curl",
"python", "nambu",
"twitt", "perl",
"sphere", "PEAR",
"java", "wordpress",
"radian", "crawl",
"yandex", "eventbox",
"monitor", "mechanize",
"facebookexternal"
);
foreach($bot_strings as $bot)
{
if(strpos($user_agent,$bot) !== false)
{ return 1; }
}

return 0;
}


$ref = getenv("HTTP_REFERER");
if ($ref == 'domain.com'){
run above function to check if its the "bad bot"
if it is > redirect to page that dosn't let them leave
}
?>

[Evan-M]

Originally Posted by jasondinner

No the site linking to all of my sites via a bot is junk. I think it's doing it at the server level. How else could it have known I owned all of these sites. They are in different niches.

well they could just whois the domain and find all the domains on the same server.

[jasondinner]

Originally Posted by Evan-M

well they could just whois the domain and find all the domains on the same server.

Very true.

Is that code above the script you were talking about?

Thanks!
Jason

[Evan-M]

Originally Posted by jasondinner

Very true.

Is that code above the script you were talking about?

Thanks!
Jason

yeah, well you need to modify it to detect the bots you don't want on your page, then whenever you site detects any of them bots have them redirected somewhere else. Protects your site, and lets normal bots and visitors enjoy your site, and at the same time lets you keep the links lol.