Handling Bad Links

[TravG]

Curious how most handle bad links. That is outside links that point to your website to a non-existent page. I have quite a few pointing to my one poker site. Is it a big deal? I guess you could do a 301 but over the course of a few months that file could get rather large. If you have a bad link do you just let it be or handle in another way?

[universal4]

There are a large number of sites out there that scrape our content, take a blurb from it and then create a bad link pointing at us.

I think a number of these sites do this on purpose, and some do it because they are totally and completely inept at what they are doing. (since their own sites also contain all these 404's)

Some of them have the 404 because the query to their database returns an url that adds the sql session id. I have also found a number of them that have our link which is valid, but then start the next sentance for the next small piece of stolen content immediately after the forst link so it will look like domain.com/page.htmlNext sentance starts here creating a bad link.

What I do is add the bad link to my htaccess and when possible I try to add a wildcard that will take care of many pages with one line.

This is what I used for the page.html&SA= type links since often sites that do those will have bunches of them.....

Rick
Universal4

[TravG]

Thanks - that did do the trick!

[universal4]

Glad you figured it out.....

I should have menetioned before that you have to be careful when messing around with wildcards in the htaccess....

The first time I played around with wildcards the syntax I used was wrong and redirected the entire site back to the root, so I had to tinker with the syntax until I got the desired effect.

Rick
Universal4

[slotplayer]

I was doing it like that, then I discovered my host had a spot to enter a custom 404 page url so I just used the page I made for the RA bounce back url.

[TravG]

I didn't use a wildcard. I will have to look into that in the future. The custom 404 is interesting. I will have to check my hosting company.

[universal4]

Having a custom 404 can be a good thing for giving you the opportunity to give the visitor that reaches the page more options to find a page that would match what they are looking for.

However when I see 404's on a site I want to fix it so the visitor does not see the 404 again.

Rick
Universal4

[casinorecommender]

Hi Everybody,

Please just think a second... If someone wants to make bad thing to us... And he/she gives link from his BAD site to your GOOD site! So... You loose Ranking. Is it so ? Or is it not so ? How can Google identifies whether we buy or not an incoming link!?! I am confused! Please help!

[GFPC]

Google is GOD and they decide. No one else will ever know

[TravG]

If its a bad link it shouldnt hurt you. Google knows that you cannot control who links to you. If the link was paid for you would it to go to a real page!

[lots0]

If its a bad link it shouldnt hurt you. Google knows that you cannot control who links to you. If the link was paid for you would it to go to a real page!

I wish that were true. But it's not.
Negative SEO is alive and well. "Bad" links do hurt ranking in google, now more than ever before.
After watching many of these negitive SEO attacks, I have no doubt at all that a well thought out Negitive SEO campaign does in fact work.

There are a large number of sites out there that scrape our content, take a blurb from it and then create a bad link pointing at us.

I do think a number of these sites do this on purpose, and some do it because they are totally and completely inept at what they are doing. (since their own sites also contain all these 404's)

Same here but instead of using a text blurb from the site, the attacks I see use keywords from the page they are linking too.

I do believe these are Negative SEO type of attacks. I also believe an established site can often just shrug off these type of attacks, but a 'new' site would be crushed.

[GFPC]

I wish that were true. But it's not.
Negative SEO is alive and well. "Bad" links do hurt ranking in google, now more than ever before.
After watching many of these negitive SEO attacks, I have no doubt at all that a well thought out Negitive SEO campaign does in fact work.

Totally agree 100% right on the money. Neg SEO is a serious problem and very easy to do. Even if you make google aware of it they usually do absolutely nothing - especially with the gambling industry - I think they automatically assume were doing shady stuff.

With my testing and research I have found this to be more true then ever the last 4 months which is why i have developed my own personal approach around it... LOL

I had a site sending 200-300 deposits a month tank and loss 90% of its value and I am 100% certain it was due to Neg SEO which i am still hounding google about and they refuse to budge.

[lots0]

I totally agree, contacting google is a waste of time... and it don't matter if you have a gambling site or not.

Most of the sites I have seen get attacked are not in the gambling nitch and google is not doing a thing to help them.. other than telling them to contact the other webmaster and ask them to remove the links... Ya like the bad guys are gonna do that.

I keep a close watch on the google webmaster forums.
It has become very depressing to read that google forum lately... so many stories of GOOD sites going down and google not giving a crap.

It would not be so bad if the sites that are popping up at the top of the google SERP were better or even as good as the sites they replace, but they are not, mostly just crap sites put up by the same people that are doing the Negative SEO attacks.

Google aint the webmasters friend anymore... (like they ever were...)

[GFPC]

SO true man - the top of the SERPs in our industry are a big fat joke. I have scene some rubbish on top sometimes in the past, but since Panda/Penguin google has destroyed the idea of quality. The idea that content is king is just horse dung.

[onemichael]

Google has now launched a new tool, Google Disavow which enables you to identify and submit any bad links that you feel could be harming your profile.

[universal4]

The bniggest slap in the face that dozens of seo sites around the world just absolutely will NOT admit?

THEY create bad links to sites by the hundreds daily.

I monitor sites linking in to my sites on a fairly regular basis and every few days I see more 404's pointing at me and OFTEN they are seo sites that have spiders that find my pages and publish a link to me that will either:
Truncate the link in the middle of a page name (thus it's a 404)
Or will add the keywor searched or to the end of the link (thus its a 404)

It's ironic that every one of these sites will always talk about making sure the outgoing links you have on your site are not 404's and many of them must have 10's of thousands, and of course they do this without care for the effect it will have on YOUR site.

Rick
Universal4

[betinstyle]

How can we found the harmfull external links of our site?

[betinstyle]

I mean is there any tool?