Can bad traffic by association ever be a good thing?
-
Back in May, my client's website www.mfcomm.co.uk was hacked. Pages were added to the site which instantly received backlinks & traffic. The secuirty flaw was plugged & offending pages deleted within the following weeks. I also created 301 redirects for the most popular pages because the domain appeared to be affected by the increase in 404 errors.
Reviewing stats & Moz reports, I notice fresh backlinks - one from http://forum.kolodec.info/. By association to the spurious page that was created as part of the security breach, should I distance the domain with any traffic from all referring sites?
Reviewing http://forum.kolodec.info/ in Open Site Explorer it only gets spam score = 4
So my question is, should I count all traffic by association as bad traffic & blacklist the domain or be more lenient? More the point, what would Google think?
Regards, Terry
-
I think that you should check is this real visit or fake one. Check HTTP access logs about such referrer and see in Analytics (or other website analytics software that you used). Also visit URL where backlink should be. Then:
- In case of link to hacked pages - disavow ASAP. Bad guys make backlinks to hacked webpages to get higher position in SERP. But this could change your linking profile. And in some situation you may face Penguin algo filter.
- In case of link to other pages and source look shady - disavow ASAP. This could be even revenge for removed hack. Also can bring Penguin.
- In case of link to non-existing link i.e. bot traffic - leave. This is case when bot make "fake visit" tricking Analytics to count it. And webmasters go to inspect source. This is "curiosity driven visit", but messing your Analytics statistics.
- In case of regular link that is relevant - keep it. Example - i have link from Pakisanian forum about people discussing something like type X vs. type Y. And someone share link from mine site explaining "here is difference between them" in article that is exactly about their discussion.
So until you didn't see original source can be anything. Also please check question and answers here:
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/community/q/is-there-value-in-disavowing-links-if-you-there-is-no-google-penalty
so disavowing isn't tool that you only use in case of penalty. You can use it even w/o penalty to make link profile clean as possible.
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
-
Is This good practice.
We are a UK company but we would like to get listed on some USA business directories. If say we enter our company name, the first and second line of our UK business address but put a USA state and a zip code would this help us for SEO or is this classed as black hat trying to deceive Google. Thank you in advance for any help.
Link Building | | Palmbourne0 -
Do you need a place to ditch bad links?
This is not a question as such, more a gift 🙂 I have registered a domain name to ditch bad links. For example, let's pretend I have a page on my site: www.mydomain.com/viagra and have never done any good SEO to promote this page, just a load of spammy directory links. The page used to rank for Viagra but then Google took manual action and I lost my ranking. Booo! Now the page is of no use to me until I get all these links removed and the manual action revoked. Even then, I'll be starting from scratch re-building good links to the page. Here's another option, simply re-direct the url to badlinksbin.com and say goodbye to all those spammy links. This bypasses the lengthy link removal process. Warning: I wouldn't recommend using this method if you have some good links in the mix, unless you can contact the site owners and get the links changed. And, don't forget to change the name of the url first so the Viagra page still exists on your site. As I've already set this up, I thought no harm sharing it and letting you guys use it too. I hope it helps some people.
Link Building | | Matt_Wilson0 -
Is Back Link Building still Good Practice
Since all the updates from Google I'm unsure as to whether I should be pursuing good quality back links and how many per month?for my website www.polesandblinds.com . We don't have a very large back link profile and its at least half of some of our competitors, we are currently active on blogging and the 4 main social sites. Many Thanks I look forward to your suggestions/advice/criticism.
Link Building | | JonnytheB0 -
Will 404-ing a URL neutralise any bad incoming links?
We're cleaning up one of our sites which was affected by Penguin. If we rename an example page1.html (which has 400 bad incoming links) to page2.html (with no 301 redirects), will Google disregard the poor links entirely? So, page1.html will return a 404 page. Many thanks for your help. James P.S. I am aware that we may lose any positive link juice from any 'good' links which come in to page1.html.
Link Building | | bytestart0 -
Can being on to many directories cause a penalty from Google?
If a URL is on hundreds of different directories would that be enough for Google to penalize a website?
Link Building | | PageOnePowerGang0 -
Backlink reports in OSE, the good and the bad!
Hi all Mozers, I have a couple of questions re the backlink reports in Open Site Explorer. In the introductory video Rand suggests that you can indentify backlinks that are a) Having a positive effect, and b) Having a negative effect on SEO campaigns. Do you identify such links using the domain/page authority of the linking page? Also, we know we have more links than OSE is reporting, does this mean that the links that are not reported are not helping our SEO campaign? Many thanks in advance, much appreciated. Lee
Link Building | | Webpresence0 -
Any one have a list of directories still good idea to submit too
I have a client who's competition is in the BBB, yahoo directory, best of the web sort of the standard ones. My client is empathetic about being in more places than their competition so a i am hoping for some help. I wasnt sure if the seomoz content of this is really relevant, seems a little dated on this specific topic.
Link Building | | EvolveDigitalLabs0