Can Hacked websites mentioning us have bad SEO repercussions?

[RatIkette]

Well... complicated situation, but I will try to explain it as good as I can...

First, thanks to you guys. You was everytime a big help for my lasts requests.

Then, I found almost 50 articles from looks like hacked websites. In fact, these articles have every time 1 external link to one of our competitor.

And it's obvious to see that they are hacked website. Let's say we are in bank niche, theses articles are in websites like pharmacies, organisations, candies, restaurants etc.... of course they also have often text colors issues, or blocks positions issues. And every single of them have 1 backlink to a competitor who looks have a great evolution of his SEO...

But that not really my issue. My issue is, on all of these articles, our branding name is mentioned... No backlinks to us, fortunately, but our branding name is everywhere on theses shi**y articles.

It would be a big work to let the hacked websites owners know that they have this issue.

So my question is that: Are these article dangerous for our SEO, and should i put big efforts in trying to close them?

Thanks again for you help. And for the time you took to read this <3

[FranticFish]

My guess would be no.

I've recently been crunching competitor link data for a financial website and I found evidence that one of the competitor sites had been hacked. What I found was links from very spammy (and even malicious / deceptive) domains to pages with urls indicating branded clothing sales. The hack had been fixed and the pages were gone from the domain, but the links the hackers built to those pages were still there to be seen. I found the site because it was on page one for the terms my clients are interested in, so the presence of these links wasn't a big deal - at least, not when balanced against the rest of their links (which were healthy looking).

So, if a small amount of very toxic links won't tank an otherwise healthy site then I doubt that toxic mentions could do any harm.