Someone sabotaging my site - what should I do?

They link my site to bad and spam link farm.

[itravelvietnam]

Dear all,

I have found a lot of links to my site from Link farms, I am sure that I have not Added my site to them, so I guess that someone DID that, maybe my compettitors.

So, guys, please tell me what should I do?

- are those links harm my ranking - remember: I do not link back to any, and my site DONT have link exchange page.
- will Google see me as A spam site with links from BAD Folks?
- and what is the best solution on this problem.

Thank you very much.

Kurt

[skweb]

Relax; do nothing.

If this sort of damage were possible, every good website will be blacklisted by now.

What gets you banned is when you are part of a link farm.

[sunny_kat]

Relax and Sip the coffee

My website was submitted to 3000 directories in a day through automated softwares by one of my competitors.

Still ranking #1

Cheers

[soapystar]

from where i sit looking at many examples of where its helping very nicely.

[Jack_Hughes]

that's one of the best compliments you can get from a competitor. nice they are thinking about you rather than how they can better server their own customers. i love competitors like that :)

the worst thing you can do is start behaving like them.

[sunny_kat]

A lovely reply jack.

I hope my competitors build some quality links for me everyday. i wont have any need to keep my 15 people team for link building purpose.

[theBear]

Kurt,

As long as your site is technically correct as to setup and it isn't an easy task for the competitor to cause those links to also disapear then I'd rest easy.

There are however some things that you should be aware of one of these is what skweb mentioned that of becoming part of a link farm, if you run a forum or other such form of a social network as part of your site you have to pay attention to links posted by your visitors(competitor for example back to those directories, some of which may be in link farms).

Another is that if your site is not up to snuff from a technical stand point it is possible for variations in the links to cause pages to get filtered out of the serps. The www/non www issue, IIs case insensitivity issue, and how the directory actually links out to you.

[aleksl]

My website was submitted to 3000 directories in a day through automated softwares by one of my competitors.

:) can you get me their email address? maybe I'll be able to piss them off enough so they do free work for me as well

[itravelvietnam]

dear Thebear and others,

Thank you very much for your prompt and great advice.

I am also concerned about the "www/non www " issue, but I dont know how to fix it, please show me the way..

-How can I redirect no www to www? and I heard someone talking about the htaccess, but I got nothing of it. Please give me an example, if my url is : [mywebsite.com,...] and where should I upload it? Root or other folders?

Sorry for this stupid quesion, acctually, I am specializing in Marketing, not Web building.

Thanks,

Kurt

[youfoundjake]

In order to make use of the .htaccess file, your hosting will need to be running apache, in which case that file will be on the root

If you are able to locate that file add the following

RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^itravelvietnam.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ [itravelvietnam.com...] [r=301,nc]

This will redirect [itravelvietnam.com...] to [itravelvietnam.com...]

Theres alot of useful threads around here to do in in both apache and IIS.

p.s
mods, i can't remove the link, how do you do that?

[itravelvietnam]

Hi youfoundjake,

Thanks for your great reply.

But, my website is not itravelvietnam, have I breached the TOS? I am sorry for that. Admin, may I change the username? if possible, Please change it to tkurt. Thank you so much for it.

I have a FTP account, and I can upload it. But I didnot see the htaccess on the root directory, So I have to creat a brand new one? if so, what should I start with, may I see the sample? I know that this forum is not an IT class, but I am sure that WebmasterWorld is great place to get great help from great people.

thanks for your help,

Kurt

[youfoundjake]

heeh, kurt, your ok, i was just using your name as an example, thats where you would put in your domain name, sorry, forgot to explain what i was doing. If there is no file there, sounds like you may not be running apache through your hosting company? If you check with your hosting company to find out if you are running IIS or apache, there are forums here that will help you get the rewrite in place according to what Web server you are using.

[itravelvietnam]

thank you very much

[itravelvietnam]

Dear all,

I really dont want to raise another topic, so could me please help me solve out this question?

I will change hosting, so my site will be offline for at least 1 day or two, so Will it cause any problem if Google crawl my site on that date? May I harm my ranking? So what I should do to avoid all of this? I am also running Adsense.

Thank you very much.

Kurt

[tedster]

Should be no problem, Kurt. Checkout the link entitled "Moving to a new web host" in our Google Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com] thread, pinned to the top of this forum's index page. That link goes to Matt Cutts' advice.

[itravelvietnam]

Hi Tedster,

I admire you and others in this forum so much.

You all, if visit to Vietnam. Dont hesitate to email or PM me. I would like to offer you with Free Guide and homestay.

Again, thanks for your help, great Guys.

Kurt

P/S: my username is not my website. I did not mean to spam. but I forget about it before. Dont look at my username. I wish I could change it.

[sunny_kat]

aleksl

Even i wish i can get their email id's.. i want to request my competitor to raise that to 5000 submissions.

I am happy about google fixing up their link bombing errors or the submissions could have made me rank on high traffic non relevant keywords :)

[itravelvietnam]

I have another question:

Will Google treat the below links the same?

[Http]://www.123456.com - simple text, not a hyperlink, I mean we can not open link with this URL
[http]://www.123456.com - A hyperlink with no anchor text

Thanks,

Kurt

[tedster]

No anchor tag means it's not a link. Google will still try to spider anything that might be a url, but if it's not an anchor, then as I understand it, there's no PR transfer or backlink influence. The "no anchor text" link is still a link, however. So no, they would not be treated the same.

[Balle]

In order to make use of the .htaccess file, your hosting will need to be running apache, in which case that file will be on the root

And if you are hosted on a windows server - running a .asp site?

[sunny_kat]

[Http]://www.123456.com - simple text, not a hyperlink, I mean we can not open link with this URL
[http]://www.123456.com - A hyperlink with no anchor text

The first one would be counted as a normal text under the website.

The second one would be backlink but wont help your anchor to be optimized.

[sunny_kat]

And if you are hosted on a windows server - running a .asp site?

IIS Configurations would work for you.