Help!!! Am I being Attacked???
-
Hello,
I do not believe so much in spammy links attacks and I definitely do not believe my site is worth attacking.
However, I'm seeing new links pointing to my site that I have no idea where they come from.
I just spotted three articles on a poor crappy article site with exact match keywords point to me. The articles are completely unique (copyscaped them) and they were posted according to the site time stamp during Oct and Nov 2012. (And they Appear in the WMT recently discovered links from more or less the same time).
What to do (besides for disavowing this domain)?
Thanks
-
I actually agree with what Mark Ginsberg said that it might be an SEO firm we hired way in the past (we don't have anyone for over 6 months) and might have pipe lined articles on our behalf.
But yes, main keywords to the exact landing pages
-
are they your main keyword phrase? not sure why someone would go thru the trouble to make them unique if they wanted to sabotage you. have u tried contacting the author?
-
Thanks, what you are saying makes sense.
(even though we haven't been using any SEO firm for many months now). -
Have you outsourced link building / SEO services to anyone? It could be they used a tool or outsourced this work to someone else, and these articles only went live in Oct. and Nov, even though they had technically gone through the pipeline a few months prioer?
It doesn't seem like someone would attack your site in that manner with a few articles on a crappy site - they would use sitewides, thousands of directory submissions, social bookmarks, etc., for much cheaper than having 3 unique articles written and posted with anchor text.
I'm more of the opinion these are remnants of an old link building strategy than of a malicious attack to hurt your site.
Mark
-
Yes these links are the only ones. It is really strange...
-
In those articles the backlinks to your website are the only ones?
If there are also other backlinks maybe the one posting the article put those links to your site without any intention to cause you harm, maybe he just wanted to add other backlinks too, to make the article look more natural.
I'm not a big fan of the Disavow Links Tool. In the official release Google said this tool should be used just in case you receive the Unnatural links warning. My advice is to always think twice before using this tool.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Complicated Title Tag Issues. Experts, Please Help!
Hey there Moz community! This is the first time I ask a question here so please forgive me if I miss any forum etiquette. I am managing SEO for an educational site which is built in React Js, and so far much of the job has been keyword research and site optimization. The site still has slow PageSpeed though. The Issues - 4 weeks ago we published 20 or so content pieces, I had pre-prepared title tags and meta descriptions. But when we released the content there was a programming error that made all of the pages show another title tag for all 20 pages instead of the pre-prepared individual title tags. I noticed this after 3 days and the issue was fixed within 6 days, but by then Google had crawled and indexed the pages. And now I can't get Google to change to the pre-prepared tags no matter what I do! I've tried changing the content, changing the URL of one of the pages, and I've sent Google spiders to re-crawl the pages multiple times. The super weird thing is that the correct title tag shows in the 'navigation bar/tabs bar' on google chrome: But NOT when I view the source code for the page: Yesterday I was taking a walk in the park and I just couldn't stop thinking about it (it is really starting to get to me by now since nothing works), so I ran back home and looked closely at one of these pages in the Google search console. And I noticed something I hadn't seen before… BOTH of the title tags can be found in the HTML: Pre-prepared title tag: <title></strong>UK Seat Belt & Car Seat Laws: The Definitive Guide<strong></title> The other title tag (in src section): title=Ace%20The%20DMV%20Permit%20Test%20%26%20Get%20Your%20License Could this be the problem or what do you think? I've understood that Google has automated title tags and that they can choose their own if they think it fits better, but the title tags aren't even close to describing the topic as it is now so it doesn’t make any sense. All answers are greatly appreciated! Your advice is life-saving for a learner like me. P.S. I love SEO but it can be very frustrating sometimes! Thank you very much, Leo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Leowa0 -
Help With This Page
This is page - http://www.kempruge.com/location/tampa/tampa-personal-injury-legal-attorneys/ - is the most important one to my business, and I can't seem to get it to rank higher. It has the second highest authority and links, second only to my homepage (though none are all that impressive) but it is just buried in the SERPs. Granted, I know Tampa Personal Injury Attorney is the hardest keyword for us to rank for, but there must be some way to improve this. I know getting high quality links is an appropriate answer, but I'm looking for anything I can do solely on my end to improve it. However, if anyone has some ways to make the page more linkable, I'm all ears! Please, if you have a second to take a look, I'd appreciate any and all feedback. Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Was my site hit by Panda or Penguin? Looking for diagnosis help
My URL is: www.westlakedermatology.com Hello Mozers, I'm looking for some help or guidance as to why my site fell off the "rankings cliff" on 9/5. In the forums I hear a lot of others with a similar issue, and some speculation it is due to a Panda refresh. However, looking at our site we have unique content with each page having over 300-400 words (so it's not light or duplicate content). We get a lot of leads that verbally tell us our content helped answer some of their questions so I'm pretty confident its good for users. Can anyone see an issue with the content on our site? In terms of Penguin, I think our backlink profile is clean, our physicians do take part in providing content to various high quality and relevant websites/blogs. But we do not buy links or do anything in violation of Google's guidelines. In terms of brand, we are the biggest dermatology and plastic surgery group in the Austin area. So any brand implications to search should be on our side. Just looking for some sort of guidance or help, any suggestions would be great! Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iderma
Adam Paddock0 -
No admin portal access to website! Help!
While reading the beginners guide, I noticed that to increase my SEO I need to have access to the physical website (ie. to use html rich text/meta tags). I, however, used a third party creative team to build my site, so I have no admin access. Are there any step-by-step instructions of things I can do if I don't have portal access to my website to increase SEO? Please let me know. Thanks..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SmartEnergy.com0 -
Looking for SEO & design help
Our website is www.mosquitocurtains.com built by an amateur (me). Traffic has been on the decline, slipping from enviable rankings, higher bounce rates. Of course I have a modest budget but can't seem to sift through those that say, "Pay us a bundle and cross your fingers that we're any good."
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kurtyj0 -
Help with setting up 301 redirects from /default.aspx to the "/" in ASP.NET using MasterPages?
Hi SEOMoz Moderators and Staff, My web developer and I are having a world of trouble setting up the best way to 301 redirect from www.tisbest.org/default.aspx to the www.tisbest.org since we're using session very heavily for our ASP.NET using MasterPages. We're hoping for some help since our homepage has dropped 50+ positions for all of our search terms since our first attempt at setting this up 10 days ago. = ( A very bad result. We've rolled back the redirects after realizing that our session system was redirecting www.tisbest.org back to www.tisbest.org/default.aspx?AutoDetectCookieSupport=1 which would redirect to a URL with the session ID like this one: http://www.tisbest.org/(S(whukyd45tf5atk55dmcqae45))/Default.aspx which would then redirect again and throw the spider into an unending redirect loop. The Google gods got angry, stopped indexing the page, and we are now missing from our previous rankings though, thankfully, several of our other pages do still exist on Google. So, has anyone dealt with this issue? Could this be solved by simply resetting up the 301 redirects and also configuring ASP.NET to recognize Google's spider as supporting cookies and thus not serving it the Session ID that has caused issue for us in the past? Any help (even just commiserating!) would be great. Thanks! Chad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TisBest0 -
I need help with setting the preferred domain; www. or not??
Hi! I'm kinda new to the SEO game and struggling with this site I'm working on: http://www.moondoggieinc.com I set the preferred domain to www. in GWT but I'm not seeing it reroute to that? I can't seem to get any of my internal pages to rank, and I was thinking it's possiblly b/c of a duplicate content issue cause by this problem. Any help or guidance on the right way to set preferred domain for this site and whiy I can't get my internal pages to rank? THANKS! KristyO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KristyO0 -
Help choosing titles
Good evening guys, I changed my titles last month, in preparation for the over optimisation penalty and the result was an instant and quite dramatic loss in traffic. I believe the reason is, the change resulted in a lot of duplicate titles. My website is similar to deviant art, but for mobile phones. So the titles include the brand of mobile phone for example. The titles were: Upload name + Brand + Content type - 3 tags - FILEID So an example would be Black Nokia wallpaper - black, abstract, grey - 12345 I changed them to Black Nokia wallpaper by artist name on domain name. But this resulted in thousands of duplicate titles and a dramatic loss in traffic. For example a user could upload 20 black wallpapers. With this in mind, I need to change my titles and fast. But I don't want to make another mistake. The one I am quite keen to try is: Black Nokia Wallpaper - Tag1, tag2 wallpapers - on domain name. So the main variable would be the name of the upload and then the 2 tags, to mix things up a little. Another option would be to throw the file ID in there somewhere? As that will always be unique. Perhaps the file ID could be in the place of the "wallpapers" after the two tags? I'd like to keep the domain name, for branding reasons. Any other suggestions are warmly welcomed. Thanks a lot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo-wanna-bs0