Drupal Site and Spam Poster's Backlinks

[5850matty]

Hi Guys

I am new to this site and pretty new to SEO but you seem a friendly bunch so I thought I would put my question to you

Just a little background:-

Three years ago we set up an anti spam/email security company, we secured the UK rights to be the country partner of a German Security company (very good product)and they manage all the of technical operations, we are not techies but we are good at sales and marketing.

We spent a lot of money getting a really good website three years ago as we knew this was our window to the world but sadly that was it, we didn't do anything with the website as it was a sales "brochure" not a selling tool. (on reflection what idiots we were !)

We have now started to look at our website differently, we have spent a lot of time redesigning it and spending a lot of money on PPC and wow, it's really working and delivering leads (I am kicking myself we didn't do this years ago).

I have been tasked with the SEO and creation of non PPC traffic and I was running some SEO reports and found that we have 360 backlinks to our site - These back links were created by spammers some years ago when they found a way of creating pages on our website, thankfully we stopped this and deleted the pages but on checking, the backlinks are still there (the linking sites are REALLY spammy)

So my questions are :-

• are these links hurting us if the pages do not exist ?
• should I redirect the broken links to the index page or some other page (I'm already thinking that could be a really bad idea)
  
• if these are hurting my sites reputation, can I get them deleted ? (probably a really noob question)

thanks in advance

Matt

 

[evolutionsigns]

The easiest way is to contact the sources of these backlinks and ask for them to be removed.

 

[tombuckland]

Hi Matt,

Okay first of all a couple of questions and things for you to do.

1.) In Google put site:YOURDOMAIN.COM

If your site comes up when you do that let me know (its a good thing). If not we have a problem.

2.) How do you know these are spam links or even still there? What tool did you use? What is the anchor text (the part that is clickable)

These links might actually be natural or not as spammy as you think.

3.) If these are pure spam links then they need to be removed or disavowed.

If they can be removed by contacting someone then I would receommend that, if not then you need to tell Google to disavow the link (basically means they don't count it.) But it can take a while to go through.

Let me know how you get on.

 

[5850matty]

Hi Tom

Thanks for the reply. I used a tool called Ahrefs and checked out the backlinks on there this showed me the 361 back links but using Google siteXXXX it showed 240 which all seem good to me - Do you think that Google has just ignored these spammy links?
in answer to your questions

2) the spammers created pages on my website like /earn-loads-of-money-buying-gold or /but-cheap- this-and-that then they linked from Chinese or Russian websites. The sites that they linked from are just linking farms (I think)

3 I assume the answer to 1 has negated this as Google are not seeing (or associating) the links?

Thanks

Matt

I've attached an image of the Ahrefs report which shows the pages created and the links they have (If UKBF let's me post it)

 

[5850matty]

http://pho.to/7ZtrJ

 

[tombuckland]

Ahrefs is the right way to go in terms of checking links so that's a good start.

If your site is appearing when you do the site:yourdomain.whatever check that is also a good sign.

If you are super worried, you can always delete those pages that have the spammy links coming in.
Again if you are super worried get the links disavowed.

Hope that helps.

 

[Chinavasion]

Completely ignore it and focus on your business.

We also get lots of spammy links from competitors and we never experienced any damage in terms of traffic or reputation loss from it. As long as they don't rank in search results related to your brand it should be fine.

 

[maxh]

If you are really worried you can disavow links from those pages or domains in Google Webmaster Tools.