What can be done about black hat spam links?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

One of my top pages is appearing in GWT with roughly 120 new domains pointing to it with a link. All are .info sites. All result in a 403 forbidden error if I try to visit them but if I use my other computers or just look at the sites in Google cache they are clearly 100% duplicate rss snippets scraped from various sites.

The sites are pure spam, and targeting my page. Only the link to my site is on the sites pages, the rest of the titles are not linked. All of the domains are exact match variants of the primary keyword. They look like a parked domain in quality, at best, and have zero original text. It's pretty blatant though my sites ranking is holding and traffic is unchanged, for now.

What, if anything, would you do about it?

[tedster]

Usually ignoring them is best. For sites that see concrete evidence that the scraper backlinks are impacting their rankings, then the solution seems to be sending stronger content ownership signals:

1. Institute authorship mark-up.
2. Use pubsubhubbub to sent "fat pings" to Google right when you publish new content.
3. Delay the standard RSS feeds for maybe an hour after publishing new content.

If you are sure you have a penalty, then a reconsideration request can also be helpful at times - however, true penalties seem to rare. Loss of authority and content ownership status is more common.

[edited by: tedster at 9:55 pm (utc) on May 23, 2012]

[gouri]

@tedster,

If it is possible to remove the links, should it be attempted if content cannot be added at the moment?

[seoskunk]

Definately ignore is best solution. There is nothing you can do to control inbound links

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Definately ignore is best solution. There is nothing you can do to control inbound links

I wouldn't say nothing, these domains are registered to someone and if my rankings suffer while under the effects of a black hat attack I have the right to sue and/or make a criminal complaint. These particular links are blatant and very targeted.

Update: a friend of mine runs a similar site with forum, we became friends because of our sites many years ago, and he contacted me saying he received an email that appeared to be from me requesting that I remove an inbound link since the page would be taken down soon. Obviously that's not true, so this blackhat attack is very targeted.

If you can offer any tips on tracking down the author, and perhaps offer tips on figuring out which site is benefiting from this, I'm all ears. I'm inclined to find out who this is at this point.

[tedster]

if my rankings suffer while under the effects of a black hat attack I have the right to sue and/or make a criminal complaint.

And as I said above, if your rankings don't suffer - it's a waste of your time and energy... and money if you take legal action.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Oh I get it, and it's true, but it feels like someone is trying to kick the door in and the proactive in me wants to open it and say hello.

[steerpikegg]

AFAIK, there is nothing you can do from a legal standpoint to force someone to remove links unless they are somehow infringing copyright or pointing to illegal content.