Spam link attack to a clients website - What should I do/Best practice

[Mandi627]

I've been working on a website for the past 12 months and although I do the SEO for the site it is more technical SEO than any link building. As there's never been an agency working on the site before, So things like meta recommendations, canonical and pagination recommendations and using analytics to optimize pages better and decrease bounce rates.

There hasn't been any link building but instead lots of hard work on their blog and working on the social channels to give attention to the blog and this has worked really well for the last 12 months. Their traffic has been steadily increasing month on month and the client really pleased.

However around the 24th March their traffic completely slumped.

Doing a little investigation showed that they have suddenly had a massive spike in new links pointing to them from spammy blog post comments. All the links point to my clients home page using either the anchor text "Cheap Nikes" or "Viagra" The links are noFollowed.

Part of me thought that even though there were thousands of these links pointing to my client that clearly had nothing to do with either products Google would know to ignore these links and not count these towards my clients profile.

The links are nofollowed anyway so again Google should ignore them.

And to safe guard the client I've also added all these horrible links to a disavow file to really show Google that these have nothing to do with my client. However there are more and more links appearing everyday using these same two anchor texts.

However just over a week since all these dodgy links started appearing the clients organic traffic has dropped dramatically.

Could a massive increase in spammy links have a negative effect on a sites organic traffic even if the links are noFollowed? Surely a negative SEO attack would use keywords and products the site wants to rank for not terms totally unrelated to the site.

What else could have caused their organic traffic to decrease so much.

If anyone has experienced anything similar or could advise me how to deal with this I would really appreciate your thoughts.

Thanks for your time

Mandi

[BoostSoftware]

How interesting!

Sorry I can't help with the organic traffic issue, however the spammy link experience happened to me during this same time period you are mentioning.

I made a simple comment to a tech-related site and got word (by finding the website I used as a back-link to my sig was removed by Google), due to that one post I made producing hundreds of clicks! What tha?

I am certain the site I was commenting on must have been hacked, but am having some issues with my website being down for this time.

I'd be interested to hear more comments and suggestions on your issue, Mandi. Thanks for reaching out on this.

I have decided to only use Disqus or Comment Luv in the future and stick to major question/answer sites for a security measure.

What a rude awakening! Great question....

[Collieman]

I am very interested to hear about the impact of spammy no follow links. A friend of mine has paid for sitewides on a low value forum...and now has some 70,000 incoming links all the same partial brand partial commercial kws.
Links from other domains are around 1/10th of this. So far not penalised but the webmasters swear the nofollows will make it safe. I doubt this.

[Planet13]

Have you double checked to ensure that your client's site hasn't been hacked?

Often if a bunch of spammy links show up it is because the spammers (believe at least) have hacked pages on the site, and are linking to those hacked pages.

Worth looking into.

[Mandi627]

Thanks for the reply's everyone,

@Planet13 all the links through the words 'viagra' and 'cheap nikes' link to the home page and as far as I am aware the home page has not been hacked.

But it is the home page that ranks for most of it's organic traffic as it's a small website in a fairly small niche selling only a small range of products.

This makes me think that these links are causing a negative effect and they are constantly appearing. I'm at a loss what to do and appreciate any further comments on this issue.

[teokolo]

Unfortunately Google doesn't seem smart enough to detect and ignore these kind of attacks.

My client website had a dramatic traffic drop because someone hacked his blog (on a subdomain), which was then linked to other 1000+ hacked blogs with Xrumer. The hacker added hundreds of articles linking to other hacked sites. The hack was fixed in 1 day and viagra pages were deleted and served with 410 status code.

In few weeks about 100.000 incoming links appeared, with viagra and pharma keywords. Most of them linked to blog homepage, some of them to deleted viagra pages. Most of them were nofollow links. No links targeted the main domain.

The result was a manual penalty for the main domain + 90% traffic drop.

Disavow didn't work, the only way to remove the penalty was deleting the blog and the subdomain dns entry.

Right now, after 1 year, traffic is increasing very very slowly but it's still -70% and money keywords are gone.
I update disavow file every week but this doesn't impact on traffic.

The situation seems different from yours, but I suggest you take a deep look to your website and server logs to be 100% sure your website isn't hacked.

[Mandi627]

There are no manual penalties in WMT so we could be suffering from something algorithmic.

But this just defies logic and everything we hear from Cutts, that negative SEO is unlikely and won't work. That no follow links don't carry any link weight. And Disavowing links tells Google to ignore them.

Unless I'm completely missing something else that would explain the sudden drops. I'm doing a full and lengthy investigation now and the main thing that I am noticing is that there are a lot of results pages where sites like e-bay are now ranking for maybe 5 out of the top 10 results. This would result in bumping other sites down but I thought this was something Google previously ironed out so wouldn't have thought it would be that.

I'm head scratching and starring into space on this one.

[Planet13]

Just some things to try:

In google, search for:

site:example.com viagra

site:example.com (another spam keyword here)

etc.,

This will tell you whether google has indexed any pages from your site with bad stuff on it.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 8:32 pm (utc) on Apr 2, 2014]
[edit reason] Exemplified (yoursite . com is a real domain) [/edit]

[Planet13]

One curious thing about whether nofollow backlinks can harm a site.

Matt Cutts has said that if they feel you are going out and actually spamming the whole internet to get links to your site (even nofollow ones) they might do something about it.

But that would most likely be for sites that are in a big money making niche already on their radar.