Strange Links

[TrafficKitty]

So its happening to me too.


2 weeks ago I logged into my GWT and saw around 900 links, but all suddenly I logged today and saw a lot of crap going on, with 3k+ links even in China! I also checked the impressions on Google and going down again... Google hasn't been treating me well lately, up and down like a ping pong ball!

I think I should disavow all these links but not sure... I also moved my domain from coolonlinecasinos.com to coolonlinecasino.com at GWT and discovered that all previous pages are linking somehow to the new domain, I believe that might be affecting my performance too although I'm totally lost.

 

[muffincrumbs]

Same crap has been happening to me. Yes disavow those suckers ASAP! I can generate a file for you if you would like Ms. Kitty but it is extremely time intensive and difficult. If you can work in a spreadsheet environment you can copy paste the domains.

To do a whole domain it should be domain:crapspamsite.org otherwise all you have to do is put the full page's URL in there.

If there really is 3k links to disavow I would do it for $50 and that goes for everyone. I could probably get 1 done every 3 days. Yes it really takes that long to check each one that could be potentially good.

Wow, I just thought of the fact that someone could do this and then offer to clean it up... please believe that is not whats going on here as I am only a pro at this because I got attacked more than a few times already.

In fact I have a couple of links that point to me and my competitor, obviously put there by my competitor, with a exact match text anchor pointing right at my bonus page with the word bonuses, while his a generic link leading to his site with another one with the exact match leading to a page with his site on it and a "nofollow".

This reversed engineering works until someone, like the owner of CBR, figures out what you are doing and decides to take action by outing you here or reporting your bad network to the webspam team.

I hate this aspect of our business.

 

[Online18Casino]

It was only a matter of time before negative seo campaigns started becoming a real problem, and Google pretty much set us up for it with the rollout of the Penguin update. Unfortunately negative seo will be much easier, faster and cheaper then white hat seo so unless they reverse that part of the algo, I don't see it coming to an end anytime soon.

 

[itsblitz]

One of my sites is being hit hard with negative seo, hundreds of spammy links found, and i havent built any links to it in months.. funny thing is, the site wasnt doing great before.. but now its 1st in G for the terms the spammers are linking lol. Gonna be interesting to see how it holds up over the next few weeks

 

[muffincrumbs]

How it is going guys? Any updates on the clean up?

itsblitz are you still doing good on those terms?

You would think that implementing a time window of spam detection, like oh 100 links where found looking similar, time to just make them have zero value, shouldn't be too hard. One of the problems is that it takes G a long time to crawl a site that has zero authority. So it only finds these links slowly. Often when you think there was 100 bad ones built to you there are probably 300 out there, just not crawled or indexed.

 

[mattsgame]

Ok, now I am completely confused. I am getting 404 errors for these links.

http://www.trycasinogamesfree.com/en/casinoblue/game/MegaMoolah

http://www.trycasinogamesfree.com/en/casino/game/viking

http://www.trycasinogamesfree.com/en/casino/game/retro-super80

http://www.trycasinogamesfree.com/en/casino/game/retro-groovy60

http://www.trycasinogamesfree.com/en/casino/game/eggomatic

I do not have any of these sub folders, or games and Casino Blue is something a multi platform casino would have (like Redbet etc) It's like someone signs up to a casino and starts playing but I am getting the 404 errors :/ I have way more of these then what I have posted.

Anyone know what's going on here?

 

[edgarf76]

You may have gotten your site hacked. Have you checked it for malware?

 

[mattsgame]

You may have gotten your site hacked. Have you checked it for malware?

I have gone through a few checks and it all seems normal to me, this was the first thing I did.

 

[edgarf76]

There may be other security measures your hosting company offers. I know godaddy offers a service for 70 a year where they scan and remove any malware. It is possible your scanner is not picking it up. I had my site hacked once, someone stuck a payday loan affiliate in my home page, and I could not find it in the code. Nothing came up on malware scanner. I'm not sure what the solution is, just letting you know what I did when it happened to me.

 

[Online18Casino]

Ok, now I am completely confused. I am getting 404 errors for these links.

http://www.trycasinogamesfree.com/en/casinoblue/game/MegaMoolah

http://www.trycasinogamesfree.com/en/casino/game/viking

http://www.trycasinogamesfree.com/en/casino/game/retro-super80

http://www.trycasinogamesfree.com/en/casino/game/retro-groovy60

http://www.trycasinogamesfree.com/en/casino/game/eggomatic

I do not have any of these sub folders, or games and Casino Blue is something a multi platform casino would have (like Redbet etc) It's like someone signs up to a casino and starts playing but I am getting the 404 errors :/ I have way more of these then what I have posted.

Anyone know what's going on here?

Did you check your GWTs account to see if Google has those 404's listed? It should tell you where the links came from.. I had a spam site linking to pages on my site that never existed and that was the cause of some 404s in the past.

 

[AussieDave]

Google pretty much set us up for it with the rollout of the Penguin update.

Google bent webmasters over long before the three animals turned up. Their alog in flawed because it factors in links. Anyone with 1/2 a brain can see it's far easier (and cheaper too) to engage in a negative seo campaign against a competitor, than to try and beat them in the serps. Fortunately not everyone is doing this but the asses who are, are gaming the Google alog to their advantage. And in a way where it can not come back to bite them!

 

[mattsgame]

Did you check your GWTs account to see if Google has those 404's listed? It should tell you where the links came from.. I had a spam site linking to pages on my site that never existed and that was the cause of some 404s in the past.

No mention of these links in GWT:/ I am seeing all of these under my 404 monitor plugin (part of SEO Ultimate). Over night it has recorded more like these http://www.trycasinogamesfree.com/en/poker/promotions/redbet_poker_open

I did more Malware tests and the site is fine in that regard, since they are not recorded on GWT should I just ignore them? It is just annoying as these were not being reported before and I do not know where they have come from.

 

[mattsgame]

No mention of these links in GWT:/ I am seeing all of these under my 404 monitor plugin (part of SEO Ultimate). Over night it has recorded more like these http://www.trycasinogamesfree.com/en/poker/promotions/redbet_poker_open

I did more Malware tests and the site is fine in that regard, since they are not recorded on GWT should I just ignore them? It is just annoying as these were not being reported before and I do not know where they have come from.

Ok so I have found out the reason that GWT doe snot list it. It seems its only Baidu who is brawling this unknown sub folders and links, very strange.

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)

Is there a way to block this spider? I do not promote to China or is it still a bad idea to block out spiders?

 

[AussieDave]

Trying to block these leaching bots and other nasties, including script kiddies and what not is a PITA. A couple of months ago I installed ZBBlock http://www.spambotsecurity.com/zbblock.php This stops everything in its tracks; even before it gains access to your content. I'd highly recommend implementing this if your not already using it.

ZBBlock is not a WP plugin, you must manually install this but the doc is very easy to understand and gives you all the coding. 1 line of code, added to wp-load.php is all it take. The install directories are protected by a vault. IP's are checked again Stop Forum Spam and a few other Blacklists, including a check which ZBBlock does to determine if the hit is from a bot or real person. Blocked access is written to a *.txt file which really opened my eyes to whom and what I've freely allowed access to my sites in the past.

Bandwidth consumption is way down and now site visits are genuine punters; stats are not inflated due to misbehaving bots and what not.

Updated *.csv files with 1000's of IP's are simple updated into your vault folder, by you, when an update is available. You can also go even further and added extra csv files for Asian Countries but China is blocked my default on the standard install.

I've since stopped using WordFence, because ZBBlock does such a good job. I do however still use a plugin to protect my wp-login though. Just in case something get through the force field

 

[mattsgame]

Trying to block these leaching bots and other nasties, including script kiddies and what not is a PITA. A couple of months ago I installed ZBBlock http://www.spambotsecurity.com/zbblock.php This stops everything in its tracks; even before it gains access to your content. I'd highly recommend implementing this if your not already using it.

ZBBlock is not a WP plugin, you must manually install this but the doc is very easy to understand and gives you all the coding. 1 line of code, added to wp-load.php is all it take. The install directories are protected by a vault. IP's are checked again Stop Forum Spam and a few other Blacklists, including a check which ZBBlock does to determine if the hit is from a bot or real person. Blocked access is written to a *.txt file which really opened my eyes to whom and what I've freely allowed access to my sites in the past.

Bandwidth consumption is way down and now site visits are genuine punters; stats are not inflated due to misbehaving bots and what not.

Updated *.csv files with 1000's of IP's are simple updated into your vault folder, by you, when an update is available. You can also go even further and added extra csv files for Asian Countries but China is blocked my default on the standard install.

I've since stopped using WordFence, because ZBBlock does such a good job. I do however still use a plugin to protect my wp-login though. Just in case something get through the force field

Thanks mate, I installed ZBBlock a few days ago and thought everything was fine and then today these pop up :/

http://www.trycasinogamesfree.com/en/casino/casino_winners

http://www.trycasinogamesfree.com/en/casino/game/roulette2adv

Again its Baidu whom is crawling these links and giving me the 404.

 

[mattsgame]

Don't know what happened here, sorry double post.

 

[AussieDave]

Thanks mate, I installed ZBBlock a few days ago and thought everything was fine and then today these pop up :/

http://www.trycasinogamesfree.com/en/casino/casino_winners

http://www.trycasinogamesfree.com/en/casino/game/roulette2adv

Again its Baidu whom is crawling these links and giving me the 404.

I've just checked my kill file log and I think your right, the last entry I have for Baidu being blocked is:

#: 2884 @: Sun, 08 Dec 2013 02:15:17 +1100 Running: 0.4.10a3 / 73
Host: 180.76.6.41
IP: 180.76.6.41
Score: 2
Violation count: 1 INSTA-BANNED
Why blocked: Baidu access is not allowed on this site. (CUST-IB-UA-CN) INSTA-BAN. No access allowed from China (CUST-IP-1235/CN-20130910) You have been instantly banned due to extremely hazardous behavior!
Query:
Referer:
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +baidu.com/search/spider.html)

---

All the other pieces of crap are still being blocked (added a couple below) but it seems Baidu is not being detected. I have updated the block.scv file to latest version. There is however another option to use with ZBBlock and that is additional Asian csv block files. These will prevent anything from China et al gaining access to your site.

These are files, whilst compatible with ZBBlock are distrubuted through another site (zbblock links directly to it: http://macmathan.info/zbblock-range-blocks/). Instructions for adding these additional blocks are found on the page to

Send a PM if you need help


#: 3325 @: Mon, 23 Dec 2013 12:57:07 +0000 Running: 0.4.10a3 / 73
Host: hosted-by.leaseweb.com
IP: 162.210.196.97
Score: 1
Violation count: 1
Why blocked: mj12 bot. Banned useragent (UA-0025).
Query:
Referer:
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MJ12bot/v1.4.4; majestic12.co.uk/bot.php?+Majestic-12 : DSearch : MJ12bot)

#: 3326 @: Mon, 23 Dec 2013 14:21:11 +0000 Running: 0.4.10a3 / 73
Host: ec2-23-23-222-104.compute-1.amazonaws.com
IP: 23.23.222.104
Score: 1
Violation count: 1
Why blocked: Amazon Web Services. Not an access provider ISP. Used by hackers, Keyword spamming SEO bots, and other unsavories (CLD-0AMZ). Checked for bypass -
Query:
Referer:
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Windows; U; Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; en-US; rv:12.0) Gecko/20120403211507 Firefox/12.0

 

[AussieDave]

Until I figure out why Baidu is not being blocked (get an answer on the zb block forum), I'll band-aid a quick fix, by banning all block ranges it uses via htaccess. I have to grab these but will posted back here.

Edited - searched my raw log file since December 8'th and I can't find Baidu anywhere. Found a couple of posts at other places, which indicated, other misbehaving bots are masking their identity by spoofing as Baudi. Thing is though, ZBBlock should still flag the useragent info. Though, going back to my raw log file, if Baudi had accessed my sites, evidence would be in the file but it's not.

Matt are you sure these pages are being crawled by the bona fide Baudi?

The other thing you could do, much better than giving a 404 in this instance, is to issue a 410 on pages which never existed or are no longer in use (that's if you have not used a 301 redirect to their new location). A 410 response tells Google and other SE bots the page has gone, not available and nothing is in its place. How you'd implement this on random generated (if that's what these are) pages, I have no idea.

I'm sure if you asked around at a respect Apache forum, someone maybe be able to help you out.

I had to do a similar thing with a forum and its folders (including SID - session id's) which no longer existed, which Google, were consistently searching for based on past links etc. This little trick stopped the 404's and slowly but surely, these obsolete pages have not been attempted to be crawled by Google since.