Somebody spammed my website - need word of advice

by luku
8 replies
Fellow Warriors,

I've built an Amazon Affiliate website - my first one. I've worked really hard on it since June this year, getting awesome quality articles and generally taking care of it like it was my baby It starts to pay off as it started to bring money recently.

Now the bad part: few weeks ago somebody spammed my site heavily by posting spammy links - over 10k of them from over 400+ unique domains. All spam links lead to one article and they look like this:

http://www.mysite.com/article/#comment-5644

Anchors look like pure spam: viagra, unlock iphone, spy gps etc.

I realize that it may be really hard for me to ever sell this site if i have such a spammy backlink profile (i am not planning to sell, but I'd like to have such an option in future 'just in case').

I know that one option is to use a Disavov Tool but is this actually going to help me? Also, i read about some of the Amazon websites being punished with a 'thin affiliate' penalty (like Spencer Haws' apennyshaved.com recently) and i am not sure whether disavowing links will not actually hurt me if someone from G's team will inspect my site manually.

I feel confused, i am not sure what to do. I would really appreciate some advice on how could i clean my backlink profile and fix "the image" of my site. Any ideas, please?

Lukas
#advice #spammed #website #word
  • Profile picture of the author sirspray
    I believe google has an amazing feature, but I cant find the link to it. Its basically a part of google that finds all the links pointing to your site and you tell google which links to count toward your website. Thus, you can eliminate spammy links from affecting your site. Best of luck
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  • Profile picture of the author GinaStringer
    In my experience, negative SEO attempt like that don't work anymore. Those links won't have any effect on you.

    But if you're still afraid of any damage, try Google Disavow Tool. Beware though, if your site is low quality in the first place, you might get penalized instead.
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    • Profile picture of the author luku
      Thanks for your help.

      In my case, 99% of those spammy links go to a subpage (not the home page). Does it make sense to just 404 that page and create new one with the same content but different URL? I understand i might lose the ranking for that page but is this something worth to do to clean the backlink profile?

      Thanks,
      Lukasz
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      • Profile picture of the author JeanneLynn
        Originally Posted by luku View Post

        Thanks for your help.

        In my case, 99% of those spammy links go to a subpage (not the home page). Does it make sense to just 404 that page and create new one with the same content but different URL? I understand i might lose the ranking for that page but is this something worth to do to clean the backlink profile?

        Thanks,
        Lukasz
        I think that's what I would do. Make another page. I'm sorry this happened to you. I hate spammers.
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  • Profile picture of the author fast2net
    Wordpress? You should be able to mass delete all the comments. To prevent future spam, you could disable the comments or use a spam plugin.
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    • Profile picture of the author luku
      Yes, wordpress. I disabled all the comments but i can't do much about spam backlinks coming from many shady sites. I am more wondering on how can i clean the link profile.

      Currently, if I do a website analysis through Ahrefs or Majestic SEO, I can see that spam anchor texts dominate, which looks really bad as my site can be viewed by a third party (i.e. potential buyer) as a spammy site, which it definitely is not - as i put lots of love into it

      So far it looks that the smartest way to go would be to kill the spammed page and simply copy its content to a new URL, letting the old one go 404.

      Anyone else has a better idea on how could I clean up the 'image' of my site?

      Thanks!
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  • Profile picture of the author Sitestomp
    You can't really control other people linking to you, so I think you found the best possible solution. Simply delete or rename the page.

    It's really annoying. I have it happening to me on one of my sites right now. Just dozens of these spam sites linking to my homepage. Might be a competitor trying to negative SEO me, who knows
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  • Profile picture of the author eac113
    Yeah I would kill that page....
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