Somebody's link bombing me

[Sweet Tooth #3]

Somebody's blasting links to one of my pages with Scrapebox. So far there's about 300 of them showing up in YSE. It seems to have started about 2 weeks ago and I've found some spam links that are about a week old.

I'm fairly sure this is a malicious attack. I talked to a couple people who do link building for me to make sure I wasn't getting any "bonus links."

Also, not a single one is from an English language site. The vast majority are from 3rd world country code domains. It even seems as if somebody went to the trouble to find pages with links to pedo sites, or is this just the norm for Scrapebox links? Now I understand what they mean by "bad neighborhood."

I'm super pissed right now. I've always held the belief that crappy links can't hurt your site. But it seems around every corner, some story about being penalized for these kinds of links pops up. And somebody took the time to do it to me.

Should I report this to Google? If there's 300 showing up in YSE, how many more are there that don't get shown?

[SteveGerencser]

Google, and many people here, will tell you not to worry because links can't harm you.. You can report them, but they won't do anything about it.. The ability to deny links in WMT has been requested for a few years now and it still hasn't been added..

Depending on your current link profile though it may not be much of an issue, if any at all.. Usually when we see malicious link building it's in the hundreds of thousands, not hundreds.. How many links do you have in total? How "good" are those links? What percentage of good links to bad links do you have?

[Sweet Tooth #3]

Google, and many people here, will tell you not to worry because links can't harm you.. You can report them, but they won't do anything about it.. The ability to deny links in WMT has been requested for a few years now and it still hasn't been added..

Depending on your current link profile though it may not be much of an issue, if any at all.. Usually when we see malicious link building it's in the hundreds of thousands, not hundreds.. How many links do you have in total? How "good" are those links? What percentage of good links to bad links do you have?

I have a feeling there are more that are just now being indexed or that YSE just isn't listing. The ones that are listed in GWT and YSE literally popped up overnight.

As for my link profile before this little fiasco, it's not great. YSE showed that the domain had about 300 links, but I know there are a lot more than that. Most of my links are Social Monkee backlinks (bookmarks), it has a few dozen links from web 2.0's, and some blog comments...a few links from guest posts... It only has about a dozen or so organic links (from forums).

I don't know if this is related or not, but YSE (and GWT) shows that I have 108 links pointing to my page from this one domain. But when I check the pages where the links are supposedly from, there's no links to my page that I can find. There's no blog comment spam, or blog comment links for that matter, just internal links in the side bar.

This sounds really weird. Am I missing something?

[Sweet Tooth #3]

I don't know if this is related or not, but YSE (and GWT) shows that I have 108 links pointing to my page from this one domain. But when I check the pages where the links are supposedly from, there's no links to my page that I can find. There's no blog comment spam, or blog comment links for that matter, just internal links in the side bar.

I hate to bump a thread, but could somebody look at the above question and see if they could tell me anything? It's possible I'm just losing my mind. If that's an option please just say so.

108 links from this one website are listed in GWT and YSE as pointing to 1 of my pages. I checked the cached pages, I even looked in the pages source code. There's no links, not 1, pointing to my site. And the site that supposedly has the links is not a spammed site.

I'm really at a loss. Any thoughts? Any at all?

[deepsand]

This is not an entirely unusual occurrence. On more than one prior occasion other members have reported seeing similar problems, with no one good explanation ever having been found.

[Sweet Tooth #3]

This is not an entirely unusual occurrence. On more than one prior occasion other members have reported seeing similar problems, with no one good explanation ever having been found.

Then I can go to bed in peace. Good night everybody. Why isn't there a sleepy smiley...

[deepsand]

[rebecca-may]

It could be a hidden link (very difficult to spot..) in a free template and they are using your website (random...) to test the link. The person using it may not even be aware what's going on...

I know it's a bit different but we had 100 of "unknown" outbound links taking page rank from one of our sites using a free WP template. It took hours of detective work to find and removing the code hiddden in the php causing it...

Have you check "whois" of the link sites?

[deepsand]

... we had 100 of "unknown" outbound links taking page rank from one of our sites ...

Don't you mean "getting?"

[Sweet Tooth #3]

It could be a hidden link (very difficult to spot..) in a free template and they are using your website (random...) to test the link. The person using it may not even be aware what's going on...

I know it's a bit different but we had 100 of "unknown" outbound links taking page rank from one of our sites using a free WP template. It took hours of detective work to find and removing the code hiddden in the php causing it...

Have you check "whois" of the link sites?

I wouldn't think it's random. These non-existent links are all pointing to the same page as the comment spam links. And like 100% of the comment spam links it's a non-English language website.