Forex backlinks have demolished my rankings.

[Randall Coleman]

I know all of you are thinking, my site is not effected. In 2 months my majestic trust level went from 42 to 14. Huge. Bing has dropped me from there first page. Google I have slipped from first page to 4th. I know you are going to say it's something else. It's Not! I have ahrefs as my backlink monitoring service. They told me the problem. The forex and this site. I know it's not this site's fault. I have been told that. This is were it originated. I have been told you are working on it. Not good enough. Fix it. It's your site. I just don't understand. I have even told you who is the owner of the forex site is, freeprwebdirectory.com
Keep acting like it's no big deal. I have not had any problems with my website ever. This happened and boom. My rankings took a dive.

 

[fisicx]

These links haven't tanked your site. They may have triggered something on your site that Google doesn't like but it's only a couple of members that have had any problems. Everyone else is ok.

There is nothing UKBF can do about this, the site has been scraped and dumped on a bunch of servers in Russia. A recent thread said there were over 120 clones.

 

[Ian J]

it's only a couple of members that have had any problems. Everyone else is ok.

Perhaps only a couple of members have mentioned it but there may be more that either haven't noticed or haven't made the connection.

When this first blew up my site also dropped a few pages but I didn't mention it. I disavowed all of the sites that I picked up and a few days later my site went back up to page two. Co-incidence? maybe or maybe not

 

[Clinton]

A recent thread said there were over 120 clones.

There are over 100,000 now. freeprwebdirectory.com is but one of them!

While I originally stated multiple times in various threads that Google is smart enough to recognise these copycats and discount them, I must also admit that Google has often proven to be very dumb (and / or very slack in taking action). I wouldn't be surprised, for example, if they've done something stupid like discounting the links but not discounting the associated anchor texts.

Despite there being tens of thousands of these links pointing to my site, I haven't seen any drop in ranking / traffic. However, at this point I will not completely exclude the possibility of some sites being negatively affected by this, especially sites without a strong backlink profile.

@Randall Coleman fisicx is right, there is sweet b*gger all that UKBF can do. If you are so sure that your signature links here are causing a problem, do something about it - start linking to all your competitors in your signature!

Seriously though, if your site has been damaged by something minor like this, you need to shore up your backlink profile. I would suggest you go work on that.

I disavowed all of the sites that I picked up and a few days later...

A few days? Google is now several weeks behind on their disavowing. One client of mine updated their disavow file in October and Google still hasn't done anything about the new URLs added there. And with several of the Russian language URLs ... you can't even add them in your disavow file (that's how smart Google is - when they came up with the disavow idea they didn't know that all domains don't use the same character set!!)

 

[Spock]

One of my sites has tanked since those links appeared. ahrefs now shows 9% of my anchor text is forex. I can't even get all the disavow together as I only have the free account with them which shows a limited amount of the links!

 

[fisicx]

Forget disavow, as @Clinton says they are now months behind and will probably never get round to clearing all the forex junk.

If your ranking has tanked it's maybe because the forex links were piled onto a link profile that may have already been teetering. I've got around 25% of my inbound links coming from the over 100,000 cloned sites and my ranking is still rock steady.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

Hi all

Just come accross this post but not sure whats what, can someone explain in layman's terms the cause and the solution if any

 

[Clinton]

Chris, see my post here. It doesn't get more layman than that.

 

[Randall Coleman]

Heres one for you. You have several people saying their site has tanked, yet some of you say no way. I got dropped by dmoz, whatuseek, who knows what else. Google may not be smart, but the seo work that you have put into your site is falling apart because others see it. Other sites that you have been linked with are dropping you. There is the real problem. Let me here your take on that one.

 

[fisicx]

....but the seo work that you have put into your site is falling apart because others see it. Other sites that you have been linked with are dropping you.

Which all points to your SEO work being a bit iffy. In any case, DMOZ isn't of any value at all and hasn't been for years.

Link building in any shape or form is precarious. If your ranking relied on links then it was a house of cards and anything could have toppled it.

What is your back up plan? What would have done if these cloned sites didn't exist and Google penalized you in some other way? Google didn't charge you for the indexing, it was a free service and the terms of use made it quite clear that Google had no obligation to index or rank your site. You can complain all you want about the UKBF clones but your ranking was never assured. Google tells you this in many places.

 

[Clinton]

Other sites that you have been linked with are dropping you. There is the real problem.

I can see how this could be viewed as a problem. But I'll come back to this in a minute.

As fisicx says, ODP has long been dead. I used to buy ODP editors on a regular basis, but I haven't bothered for many years now because low ranked editors kept getting kicked out and and it wasn't worth trying to corrupt a meta - too much effort. But mostly because the ODP link ceased contributing as much as it used to do, it became almost irrelevant.

whatuseek? What's that?

Returning to the matter of other sites dropping you - that's probably a good thing. Sites that drop you because your link profile has changed are not sites you want to be associated with. They stink of artificiality. I've written articles for numerous business publications. All those articles in respectable business publications still link to me. Why wouldn't they? It's only a sh*tty organisation that would drop their link to me because of some third party site getting hacked. I would not want to be associated with an organisation like that. I suggest you avoid them as well; once this passes there's no knowing what their next excuse will be to cancel your link! Get solid reliable links from sites that link to you because of your valuable content (not because you've done some back door deal with them i.e. artificial links trying to masquerade as natural).

If you are so sure that your signature here has become SEO negative, do the only smart thing and fill your signature with links to your competitors.

 

[Randall Coleman]

I have one of the most reputable companies doing my seo. They are the ones telling me this. I have very good content. This all happened when the forex thing happened. I'm sorry. It's my opinion amongst others. I do not blame uk business forum. They were hacked. I would like to get my hands on the slime that did this. I will bounce back. I will be ok. I have 16000 customers. 30 YEARS in business. I guess i just got used to ranking so well thathat it was a wake up call. I love this forum. Kat, Christopher, and the support are wonderful. Just a lite venting. Lol

 

[Clinton]

I have one of the most reputable companies doing my seo. They are the ones telling me this.

I don't know who your SEO company is, but I know numerous "highly reputed" SEO companies that pump out more manure than a medium sized dairy farm.

Oh, BTW, UKBF wasn't "hacked". It was scraped. No, not scrapped as some people seem to be saying. Not hacked, not scrapped. Just s-c-r-a-p-e-d. And scraping is a total irrelevance compared with, for example, Methbot (or the reason why you shouldn't advertise on Facebook, Youtube etc. )

 

[fisicx]

I have one of the most reputable companies doing my seo.

Well they aren't doing a very good job, your site is full of basic SEO errors. If your site was well optimised you wouldn't have to pay an SEO company to do anything and your ranking wouldn't be affected by the scraped UKBF content.

 

[LeafletsInLincs]

Old thread but i've only just noticed these links in expensive backlinks software.

DId UKBF issue any notification about this to members as it crippled my website & correlated with a huge drop in rankings which we could not fathom. Now looking back it correlated perfectly with website rankings tanking.

I want to know if UKBF told it's members & if not why not ?

I understand it is not UKBF fault.

 

[fisicx]

DId UKBF issue any notification about this to members as it crippled my website & correlated with a huge drop in rankings which we could not fathom. Now looking back it correlated perfectly with website rankings tanking.

There were a number of threads on this topic. Most members didn't see a drop in ranking. Those that did were sites that relied heavily on backlinks.