Very dodgy links

[sherlock]

Hoping someone can tell me how seriously this might be damaging our search engine presence, if at all.
It appears our previous SEO agency have built some links to our site from porn websites - not like Redtube or anything like that but they're still definitely porn. All of the links that i have found are no-follow.

How much damage do you guys think these links are doing? Obviously i realise they're not good but there's a chance i won't be able to get rid of them.

 

[Zen Alex]

at least it gives people something to look at while they shop around i for one dont see anything wrong with it as long as you dont have minors login on to your site!

 

[sherlock]

Thanks, but i think you may have missed my point

 

[Zen Alex]

''How much damage do you guys think these links are doing?''

how long is a piece of string...

 

[BobbyBoy]

That could be a problem. If you are concerned about these links form an SEP point of view then you can use the new Google Link Disavow tool to tell google that you do not want these links to be considered

There is plenty of info online about this.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/a-new-tool-to-disavow-links.html

Bobby

 

[sherlock]

''How much damage do you guys think these links are doing?''

how long is a piece of string...

You're a really helpful guy. Let's hope you stick around!

 

[Ste Hughes]

All websites have bad links somewhere - maybe not porn links but look at it from Googles eyes.

You have a clean profile, all of a sudden you have porn links.

Google know there are dicks out there who attempt this, its called negative SEO.

Buying links with those anchors are pointless. At this stage its so obvious what they have done.

I would not worry, if you feel worried by it use their disavow tool.

 

[Websitehandyman]

I think the is no truth in the rumour that the BBC have employed 50,000 new staff members to disavow links to bbc.co.uk in millions and millions of iffy sites around the globe

Google is now fishing in very muddy waters. Indicating that links to your site can spoil your site reputation and expecting site owners to guess at what links and then sit entering those links into there machine.

In one way I'm glad because it gives me another line of income, charging SEO companies for removing links to their clients site. I've decided that I'll charge the same as for adding the link plus £10 for my extra time.

In fact if I was a bit less honest I would spend a month or so setting up spam / rubbish sites and placing links to big companies on them. I could get perhaps 20,000 links into a site for the cost of a domain and an hours work. I just sit back and wait for the emails and charge £50 to remove the link. I would only need 5% of the links removed to earn £50,000

I think that's a sense of how this is going. I don't think us small guys have much to worry about if we have good content it will over shadow any links.

 

[MarcusMiller]

Have you any evidence they are doing any damage at all? Have you seen any traffic drops or indications of a problem?

Check your organic traffic against dates of known updates:
http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

There is a lot of very specific ratios going on here and if this accounts for like 10% of your link profile you can probably ignore it. If you want to be whiter than white you can always try to remove them, document your efforts and then do a re-inclusion request followed by disavowing the problem links.

Without taking a look it's hard to provide anything other than very general advice but odds are you have nothing to worry about unless this makes up a large part of your link profile.

Hope that helps

 

[mobious]

Porn sites? They are not good no? I must of been misinformed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7W0o65tTIQ

On a serious note: you can submit bad links via the Google WMT

 

[PBscott]

Google should send you a message on your Google Webmaster tools if they find something they have a problem with.

I think they are more against link farms than porn sites, they were really sick of scrappers, link farms and advertising bait, hopefully you were not caught up in that.

My website suffered from all the other website that were linking to me blocking profile pages and other such things in the robots.txt, and of course going nofollow on everything else, stuff like that can lead to a serious drop over a year as it did me.

 

[webgeek]

Inbound links from porn/gambling/pharma sites are really no different than inbound links from others.

"bad links" can come from any neighbourhood and typically would be seen as:
1) comment spam - garbage comments on autoapproved blogs with thousands of other comments
2) forum profile spam - profiles set up with the express purpose of generating a backlink
3) poor quality guest posts - typically machine generated 'spun' content with a similar version posted across multiple sites

As with most of the backlink types above, a handful of these types of links isn't a worry. It's when you start seeing hundreds or thousands of them with same/similar anchor text that you should start worrying.

I've seen numerous banking and education sites propped up by links from porn sites. They didn't harm, and in fact helped, the rankings.

Bottom line: Links from porn sites are not inherently bad.

 

[pickaweb]

Create a google webmaster accounts. If you already have, have you had any warning messages from them?