Yet another Penguin question...SPAM links?

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So I had several websites get completely destroyed by Penguin. I went in and checked the backlinks with Webmaster Tools and found a lot of links that are from sites I have never heard of. I went to the pages listed and most of them are blog posts about random things with my sites linked at the bottom with anchor text like "carrie underwood" or "joe". My website is not about either one of these.

I have not done any auto linking or auto submissions...paid links, link packages, or anything else to these sites. I am not sure how exactly the links got there. I am not sure how to get them removed. I've emailed some of the websites and I am waiting to see what happens. However, on most, there is no contact information and the whois is privacy blocked.

Is there a way to fix this...some how?

Thank you.
#search engine optimization #links #penguin #questionspam
  • Unfortuneately this is the kind of negative seo that google has made possible now. There is almost no way you will ever get any significant number of those links removed.

    You can try to overwhelm those links good links. If you have 100 bad links and you build 500 good ones, you might start to see a change.

    Some people faced with that reality are just starting over. That is what Matt Cutts said many would need to do. If the site was a great money maker I wouldn't give up until I tried everything to bring it back, but if it was a non producing site or very little, then it might be easier to start over clean.
  • Sounds like someone didn't like you ranking above them and sent a ton of junk links at your site. Unfortunately Google has decided to do nothing about it.
  • Looks like your competition negative SEOed your site.
  • oh man!!! i see only one rescue... put up LOT of fresh contents to your new site and keep the backlinking process under check. dont overdo it.
  • Thanks everyone. I am really trying to not start over....the domains are between 8 and 14 years old with a lot of years spent build customer good faith, branding, etc, so I'd rather not start with a new one!!

    I'll give the fresh content and good links a go and see how we end up. The 14 year old domain name has not been hit too bad and seems to be slowly recovering, but it still has 406 of these bad links. It does have good links that are 12 and 13 years old though, so maybe that is helping. The others have been completely wiped out.

    Google really needs to figure out a way to stop this, its not right that we spend years of hard work to build a website, get good links, build the brand...and then it gets completely slaughtered by some jerk! Oh well....I guess there is always social marketing to get traffic!
  • Looks like your competitor did reverse SEO of your website. If you didn't then links couldn't go on their own.
    • [1] reply
    • Is there any way to guard against the negative SEO? I mean, how do the big companies avoid it?
  • I don't think you got hit by Penguin, based on what you described. 14 year old sites seem to get hit by Panda more than Penguin.

    How much have you updated your content and design in the last 14 years?
    • [1] reply
    • The 14 year old site has been updated pretty regularly. I took it offline for about 9 months, but other than that...it is updated once or twice a week and I cannot even start to count all of the designs we've gone through. HTML, PHP, Joomla, WordPress, HTML, back to WordPress....

      I just checked and none of the sites have been deindexed, they have just been moved down 7 to 50 pages.

      Some of the other sites have not been updated recently, its been a month for one of them, about 5 months for another one, and 1 year for the other.

      The onpage optimization is not over done. KW density is like 1% to 1.5% and that is if I keep track. I have the page/meta titles done and descriptions....thats pretty much it. I have nothing that could possibly be looked at as duplicate content.


      How do I figure out if it is Panda or Penguin....it happened right as Penguin was rolled out so I automatically figured that was it.
      • [1] reply
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    Yet another Penguin question...SPAM links?

    So I had several websites get completely destroyed by Penguin. I went in and checked the backlinks with Webmaster Tools and found a lot of links that are from sites I have never heard of. I went to the pages listed and most of them are blog posts about random things with my sites linked at the bottom with anchor text like "carrie underwood" or "joe". My website is not about either one of these. I have not done any auto linking or auto submissions...paid links, link packages, or anything else to these sites. I am not sure how exactly the links got there. I am not sure how to get them removed. I've emailed some of the websites and I am waiting to see what happens. However, on most, there is no contact information and the whois is privacy blocked.