Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Chinese Sites Linking With Bizarre Keywords Creating 404's
-
Just ran a link profile, and have noticed for the first time many spammy Chinese sites linking to my site with spammy keywords such as "Buy Nike" or "Get Viagra". Making matters worse, they're linking to pages that are creating 404's.
Can anybody explain what's going on, and what I can do?
-
May concern was these screwed up links would somehow impair ranking, but I guess not. Thanks for the link.
-
Check this post out, it may help https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en
EGOL knows what he/she/it's talking about. You can report and disavow if you'd like, but worry about yourself. These people don't go away and are better off ignored if they aren't directly effecting your marketing efforts.
-
I'm not saying I want to chase them. I'm not about to submit emails to each of these sites, since it's obvious they don't speak English. On the other hand, I do possess all the urls, and I would like to report them...somewhere. This is abuse, and should be stopped.
-
There are more of these than you have time to chase.
Improve your own site and forget about this is the best use of your time.
-
Below is a sample link...not the word "hollister" used throughout the page..
http://web-tutor.in/content/add-your-customs-table-views?page=3
Whether is accidental or intentional, there's got to to be something I can do to get back at these jokers.
-
These are usually businesses who have robots that crawl the web, grab sentences, grab images, grab URLs and slap them together onto a website.
They often have crappy programmers that screw up the format of the site or make other errors. One error is miswritten URLs that hit error pages on your site.
This is a common problem. All of my sites have these types of links.
Cussing provides some relief.
-
What if this is intentional? Furthermore this problem is spread across many sites.
-
Weasel businesses with incompetent programmers.
Not much you can do about it, unless you want to go to China and grab them by the tie.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Over-optimizing Internal Linking: Is this real and, if so, what's the happy medium?
I have heard a lot about having a solid internal linking structure so that Google can easily discover pages and understand your page hierarchies and correlations and equity can be passed. Often, it's mentioned that it's good to have optimized anchor text, but not too optimized. You hear a lot of warnings about how over-optimization can be perceived as spammy: https://neilpatel.com/blog/avoid-over-optimizing/ But you also see posts and news like this saying that the internal link over-optimization warnings are unfounded or outdated:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SearchStan
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-no-internal-linking-overoptimization-penalty-27092.html So what's the tea? Is internal linking overoptimization a myth? If it's true, what's the tipping point? Does it have to be super invasive and keyword stuffy to negatively impact rankings? Or does simple light optimization of internal links on every page trigger this?1 -
How to tell the date a link was created
Does anybody know of a website that can let you know when an external link was created to a site? Or any other way of finding this info out. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobSchofield0 -
Do Q&A 's work for SEO
If I create a good community in my particular field on my SEO site and have a quality Q&A section like this etc (ripping of MOZ's idea here sorry, I hope it's ok) will the long term returns be worth the effort of creating and man ageing this. Is the user created content of as much use as I think it will be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mark_baird0 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Do 404 pages pass link juice? And best practices...
Last year Google said bad links to 404 pages wouldn't hurt your site. Could that still be the case in light of recent Google updates to try and combat spammy links and negative SEO? Can links to 404 pages benefit a website and pass link juice? I'd assume at the very least that any link juice will pass through links FROM the 404 page? Many websites have great 404 pages that get linked to: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fretardzone.com%2F404 - that was the first of four I checked from the "60 Really Cool...404 Pages" that actually returned the 404 HTTP Status! So apologies if you find the word 'retard' offensive. According to Open Site Explorer it has a decent Page Authority and number of backlinks - but it doesn't show in Google's SERPs. I'd never do it, but if you have a particularly well-linked to 404 page, is there an argument for giving it 200 OK Status? Finally, what are the best practices regarding 404s and address bar links? For example, if
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford
www.examplesite.com/3rwdfs returns a 404 error, should I make that redirect to
www.examplesite.com/404 or leave it as is? Redirecting to www.examplesite.com/404 might not be user-friendly as people won't be able to correct the URL in the address bar. But if I have a great 404 page that people link to, I don't want links going to loads of random pages do I? Is either way considered best practice? If I did a 301 redirect I guess it would send the wrong signal to the crawlers? Should I use a 302 redirect, or even a 304 Not Modified redirect?1 -
How to properly link network of microsites and main sites?
Law firm has a main brand site (lawfirmname.com) with lots of content focusing on personal injury related areas of law. They also do other unrelated areas of law such as bankruptcy and divorce. They have a separate website for bankruptcy and a separate one for divorce. These websites have good quality content, a backlinking campaign, and are fairly large websites, with landing pages for different cities. They also have created local microsites in the areas of bankruptcy and divorce that target specific smaller cities that the main bankruptcy site and divorce site do not target well. These microsites have a good deal of original content and the content is mostly specific to the city the website is about, and virtually no backlinks. There are about 15 microsites for cities in bankruptcy and 10 in divorce and they rank pretty well for these city specific local searches. None of these sites are linked at all, and all 28 of the sites are under the same hosting account (all are subdomains of root domain of hosting account). Question, should I link these sites together at all and if so how? I considered making a simple and general page on the lawfirmname.com personal injury site for bankruptcy and divorce (lawfirmname.com/bankruptcy and lawfirmname.com/divorce) and then saying on the page something to the effect of "for more information on bankruptcy go to our main bankruptcy site at ....." and putting the link to the main bankruptcy site. Same for divorce. This way users can go to lawfirmname.com site and find Other Practice Areas, go to bankruptcy page, and link to main bankruptcy site. Is this the best way to link to these two main sites for bankruptcy and divorce or should I be linking upward? Secondly, should I link the city specific microsites to any of the other sites or leave them completely separate? Thirdly, should all of these sites be hosted on the same account or is this something that should be changed? I was considering not linking the city specific sites at all, but if I did this I didn't know if I should create different hosting accounts for them (which could be expensive). The sites work well in themselves without being linked, but wanted to try to network them in some way if possible without getting penalized or causing any issues with the search engines. Any help would be appreciated on how to network and host all of these websites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | broca777110 -
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske0 -
Transfer link juice from old to new site
Hi seomozzers, The design team is building a new website for one of our clients. My role is to make sure all the link juice is kept. My first question is, should I just make 301s or is there another technique to preserve all the link juice from the old to new site that I should be focusing on? Second Question is that ok to transfer link juice using dev urls like www.dev2.example.com (new site) or 182.3456.2333? or should I wait the creation of real urls to do link juice transfer? Thank you 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0