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Apart from an article on Search Engine Roundtable, I haven’t been able to find anything out about the potential algorithm update that happened on Monday / Tuesday of this week. One of our sites (finance niche) saw drops in rankings for bad credit terms on Tuesday, followed by total collapse on Wednesday and Thursday. We had made some changes the previous week to the bad credit section of the site, but the curious thing here is that rankings for bad credit terms all over the site (not just the changed section) disappeared. Has anyone else seen the impact of this change, and are there any working theories on what caused it? I’m even wondering whether a specific change has been made for bad credit terms (i.e. the payday loan update)?

Hello there, Happy new year for everyone, and good luck this year. I have a real problem here, I saw in MOZ link history that somehow the "Total Linking Root Domains" is growing from a medium of 30 - 40 to 240 - 340 links and keep it growing. I guess somebody make me good joke, cause i did not buy any link :)) even cn, brasil, jp links, my store is from Romania. How I can block these links I think google will make me bad instead. What should i do? Thank you so much. With respect,
Andrei 0tYg1wB.png

Hey everyone, This is a first for me, I'm wondering if anyone has experienced a similar situation and if so, what the best course of action was for you. Scenario In the process of designing a new site for a client, we discovered that his previous site, although having decent page rank and traffic had been hacked. The site was built on Wordpress so it's likely there was a vulnerability somewhere that allowed someone to create loads of dynamic pages;  www.domain.com/?id=102, ?id=103, ?id=104 and so on. These dynamic pages ended up being malware with a trojan horse our servers recognized and subsequently blocked access to. We have since helped them remedy the vulnerability and remove the malware that was creating these crappy dynamic pages. Another automated program appears to have been recently blasting spam links (mostly comment spam and directory links) to these dynamically created pages at an incredibly rapid rate, and is still actively doing so. Right now we're looking at a small business website with a touch over 500k low-quality spammy links pointing to malware pages from the previously compromised site. Important: As of right now, there's been no manual penalty on the site, nor has a "This Site May Have Been Compromised" marker in the organic search results for the site. We were able to discover this before things got too bad for them. Next Steps? The concern is that when the Penguin refresh occurs, Google is going to notice all these garbage links pointing to those malware pages and then potentially slap a penalty on the site. The main questions I have are: Should we report this proactively to the web spam team using the guidelines here? (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1) Should we request a malware review as recommended within the same guidelines, keeping in mind the site hasn't been given a 'hacked' snippet in the search results? (https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/4598410?hl=en&ref_topic=4596795) Is submitting a massive disavow links file right now, including the 490k-something domains, the only way we can escape the wrath of Google when these links are discovered? Is it too hopeful to imagine their algorithm will detect the negative-SEO nature of these links and not give them any credit? Would love some input or examples from anyone who can help, thanks in advance!

I'm new to SEO, so somebody needs to explain to me what is kosher or not. Playing around with opensiteexplorer I came across a network of websites that all link together from a page of links, only the linking page is hidden to the viewer, with an empty anchor tag or something small like a period. example http://zinasdayspa.com/ links to http://zinasdayspa.com/links_baltimore_hair_salon_day_spa_fells_point_federal_hill_canton_maryland.phpwith a tag at the very bottom, that links to http://www.6611111.com. It's interesting because some of these websites rank high with google, but when I do link:http://www.6611111.com, google shows no results! Something very strange is about this, and I wanted to know how http://www.6611111.com ranks so high for such a competitive keyword such as stop smoking, and if this is blackhat. My intuition tells me it is, but I'm also curious how it ranks high.

Has anyone used this? www.linkdetox.com/ Any opinions about it?

Hi Everyone, Is http://ezinearticles.com/ any good to use? Thanks

Hello, For the first time, I think my site has been the victim of a black hat (spam) attack 😞 I have a blog in a competitive niche and my rankings suddenly dropped (from top 3 to top 20). A quick peek at my latest backlinks using Open Site Explorer "Just Discovered" revealed some nasty looking comment spam links with my target keywords posted recently. Of course, I haven't hired anyone to post such links and I haven't done it myself.  So my only guess is that a competitor has been generous enough to invest on spamming my site. Questions: 1. How can I confirm if this is in fact a spam attack? 2. Should I worry about this? 3. If so, what is the best way to go about this? Would appreciate any thoughts on this. Thanks in advance! Howard

I noticed a few strange crawl errors in a Google Webmaster Tools account - further investigation showed they're pages that don't exist linked from here: http://404checker.com/404-checker-log Basically that means anyone can enter a URL into the website and it'll get linked from that page, temporarily at least. As there are hundreds of links of varying quality - at the moment they range from a well known car manufacturer to a university, porn and various organ enlargement websites - could that have a detrimental effect on any websites linked? They are all nofollow. Why would they choose to list these URLs on their website? It has some useful tools and information but I don't see the point in the log page. I have used it myself to check HTTP statuses but may look elsewhere from now on.