Links in a Link Farm - Using Google Webmaster Tools to Locate the Bad Inbound Links to Your Site

February 7th, 2009

It’s again 11:30 at night - I’m having a hard time keeping my 40-year old Mommy eyes open - but I’m on the scent of some bad links using Google Webmaster Tools. I’m continuing to work on a Google blacklisting, or apparent penalty for a client’s organic visibility.

Here are a few of the sites that I’m investigating - check them out to see how the bad link farm code is being utilized - and here’s where to look

Scroll to the bottom of the home page if that is the URL I’ve provided below - see the small font, or invisible code by reviewing Source Code under the View menu bar

http://www.omproducciones.com/2007/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4&Itemid=2

http://zeffiro.org/ - this one is invisible - you have to View Source to see the “phentermine” type links - there are hundreds if not thousands of those links buried in the home page’s source code. Sad irony or intended irony? First line of the site - Behind the message is the thought - well, behind this website is a mess of a link farm either intentional or unbeknowst to the owner.

http://www.berensononcology.com/index.html - buried source code at the bottom of the home page - you can see this one a little easier than some of the others - you can tell some thing is there - just highlight the opaque content at the bottom of the page. You can see that some of the links (if not all) go to a Spanish (.es) domain, and then redirect to www.topmeds10.com - so are all of these sites in a known link farm, and participating in such services, or are they unaware and innocent victims that are getting penalized by Google?

So, here is another bad link noted by Google Webmaster Tools:

www.jeremyfoster.com - note the code at the bottom of the page

Here’s what my client’s web pages would look like:

Files that were posted to a hidden subdirectory containing keyword embedded URLs such as the one below:
/phentermine-same-day-shipping.html

It’s interesting to note that many of these sites in the link farm, which Google Webmaster Tools has identified for us, are from Korea, such as those below:

http://www.bitl.co.kr/

http://www.skad.co.kr/board/board_1.ph…de=tb_free&page=&v_number=23538 Jan 25, 2009
http://www.farmmilk.co.kr/bbs/zboard.p…=on&select_arrange=hit&desc=asc Jan 24, 2009
http://www.farmmilk.co.kr/bbs/zboard.p…amp;select_arrange=headnum&desc=asc Jan 24, 2009
http://disk.co.kr/

So, my question is for Matt Cutts and Google - once you’ve identified these sites - and you know that your site was hacked and these links have at least been removed from your site- how do you get back in Google’s good graces?

I’d be really appreciative if Matt Cutts would comment on this blog entry and offer some advice as to how to fix. Here’s what we’ve done thus far:

1) Removed hack attack folder from client website
2) Added folder to Google Webmaster Tools to block - accepted this past week
3) Added folder to robots.txt - Google Webmaster accepted this past week
4) Noted that 68% of our organic terms have fallen out of Google since hack attack and months that followed shortly thereafter
5) Reviewed Google Webmaster tools for other link problems - noted a few others that aren’t very good links - cleaning up now; requesting removal

Any other suggestions?

Posted in Link Building & Link Farms, Search Optimization (SEO). No Comments »

 

Using Google Webmaster Tools to Troubleshoot Your SEO Rankings & Penalties

by Laura Thieme

Have you ever wondered if your site could be banned by Google? Wouldn’t it be nice if Google told you this, specifically in big black bold letters at the top of your log-in screen?

If you are using Google Webmaster Tools, they’ll tell you how often they visited your site (sort of - nothing compared to the detail NetTracker gives you in the robot analysis), keywords used to visit your site (partial list), and technical errors they experienced in crawling your site. The type of information has grown over the past couple of years and become quite a useful tool in troubleshooting your organic SEO search engine rankings.

It gives you how many pages are indexed (google search site:yourdomainname.com), as well as sites that are related to yours, which is interesting to note (related:yoursite.com). Of course, it tells you the links coming into your site, which is where it gets interesting.

I have been working on a client site for several months now. They are under a penalty, or so it would seem. There is no black and white box that informs you of this status, it’s just that you begin to determine this if you are not improving for select keyword phrases, or certain terms have fallen out all together in Google. We are ranking well in Yahoo & MSN for the terms, and in fact have improved in those search engines for many of these terms. But in Google - most of the terms that we would like to have - have not done well, or not improved much. So, why is that?

We knew the client’s website was hacked last spring in 2008. What we didn’t know was that 30,000 pages had been appended to their site, and despite being once cleaned up, they resurfaced several months later. A colleague of mine reviewed the way the pages were excluded and redirected. We learned that we were not telling Google what to do with the hacked section of the site, and thus needed to update the robots.txt file, as well as do a 404 error. The previous SEO consultant had placed a 302 redirect on the website pages, which told Google that these files were temporarily moved as opposed to permanently moved or deleted. We updated the files with a 404 (file not to be found) message, and the robots.txt file excluding that directory from Google’s index. We followed Google’s recommendations for “if your site has been hacked”, or if you “need to remove a directory from Google’s index”.

The good news - within one business day - the site has had the requested subdirectory removed, as well as individual pages we’ve requested removed.

The bad news and the million dollar question - we’re no longer ranked for core terms for this client - so how long will it take to restore their search engine rankings?

More to come on this topic as new information to report is available.

Posted in Search Optimization (SEO). No Comments »