Spam links

Is there any way to prevent sites linking to yours.

[lawlessPaul]

I launched a website in late november and i haven't started trying to get inbound links yet but today i received a google alert saying that 5 sites were linked to mine..

<snip>

these look like spam sites to me and i dont want them linking to my site as i presume it will only damage my google ranking. Is there any way that i can prevent these sort of sites linking to mine or is this sort of thing common and something i shouldn't worry about?

Paul Lawless

[edited by: engine at 2:02 pm (utc) on Jan. 8, 2007]
[edit reason] See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[DamonHD]

Hi,

1) No.

2) If you really don't visitors from those sites then you could check the Referer header for those sites and put up an error page instead.

Rgds

Damon

[lawlessPaul]

Ok thanks for the help!

And will keep that in mind for next time i post.. oops

[ShootinBlanks]

Our site has a similar problem, we've been around for over 5 years and have achieved a PR of 6 and seem to be becoming a bit of an "authority site" and have recently been getting unsolicited links from blog site pages that consist of a couple hundred words of nonsense text with links to total spam sites and a link to us.

We are concerned that these obvious spammers will somehow damage our credibility or hurt us with Google when they figure out these spammers. Should we notify Big G about it or is it a waste of time. We have no interest in any traffic from these sites and don't wish to be associated with them in any way. Putting up an error page for each one would be hard as there are several of these links a day coming in.

We can't be the first ones to have this problem, but I can't find any previous post that addresses this particular issue.

Any helpful suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[martinibuster]

I'm not sure this is a problem unless spam sites are ranking for your domain/business name. Many sites have enormous amounts of spam sites linking to them. Just do a backlink search and restrict the search to dot info domains.

[ShootinBlanks]

Not sure I understand your answer, actually that's not true, I understand the first part fine, but what exactly does checking backlinks from dot info domains tell me?

[martinibuster]

what exactly does checking backlinks from dot info domains tell me?

Try it on any half decent domain and you'll see what I mean. Check it using Yahoo by searching like this:

linkdomain:example.com site:.info

[SteveWh]

Google and other crawlers know that you cannot control who links to you. It is very unlikely you would incur any penalty.

You could ask the sites to remove their links to you, but good luck. Also, these links seem to come and go. I've found my site listed on cached garbage pages, but when I go to the live page, it's not there anymore.

BTW what is this "google alert" about sites linking to yours? Just curious.

[ShootinBlanks]

Thanks for the info, it makes more sense than some. Kinda what I figured, but it was bothering me.

Google alerts can be set up at:

[google.com...]

I can't remember the exact process used, but I've been receiving alerts whenever G finds a new link to my site for quite a while so the process works just fine.

[SteveWh]

Thank you for the link. I've not used that Google service, and it would never have occurred to me to use it for that purpose!

[cnvi]

No. There is no technical or legal way to keep a site from linking to yours. Don't worry about it when a site links to yours and you don't approve of it. The search engines realize you have no control over who links to you.. if they did "subtract points" for such activity, any competitor could harm your rankings. It doesn't work that way.

Who you link out to tells the SEs alot about your linking strategy. Your RLR (reciprocal link ratio) also tells the SEs alot about your linking strategy. Obviously, don't link to junk/spam sites that you don't care for.. that shows the SEs you don't approve.

I have been managing link campaigns for 8+ years and my experience has shown me "spam/junk" links won't hurt a site.. but they won't help it either.

Keep your linking relevant for your end users and you will do fine long term.

[ShootinBlanks]

Thank you as well. I guess it's a kind of compliment to have one of these sites figure they will get some benefit from linking to us. The link to us is usually the only offsite link on the page.

Thanks again to everyone for the responses. This place IS pretty special.