Last year, during a chat with one of the @seoptimise twitter followers, they mentioned a post on SEJ about how it is a myth that bad links can get your site penalised (a position that the author later changed after feedback) and asked my opinion on it. The strange thing was that a few months earlier I had to sort out the exact issue for one of our clients. So I thought it would be an idea to write a post it.
The background
We had been working with our client for about a year and, through a sensible link building campaign, had just managed to achieve decent rankings for some of the most competitive and highest converting terms in their industry. Then within a week their previously consistent bottom of page one/top of page two rankings (doesn’t sound great until you see their competitors) dropped to page three and four, at the same time as their link count experiencing a large and very unnatural spike.
Upon investigation of their back links we identified over 80 sites each linking back from ten different pages with exactly the same title tags (which were the same as some pages on our client site), random URLs and the same anchor text. They were remarkably easy to spot.
When we checked the sites it appeared some were adult or other spammy sites, but most of the sites were hacked WordPress sites. They had ten or so pages added that used the HTML code and content from our clients’ site. To make matters worse they had replaced some of the content with links to Viagra, casino and adult sites – not really neighbourhoods we wanted them to be associated with.
So the scale of our problem was 800+ pages linking multiple times to our client, as well as various low quality/spammy/malware sites, using large parts of our clients’ content, effectively creating duplicate content issues.
So if you have a similar problem here is what I suggest doing next…
Step 1 – Identify you have a problem
This is probably step minus one, and it is usually quite easy, but you have to be looking (if you don’t check your own backlinks regularly you should). You do not want your client to find out before you!
Just to show you how easy it can be sometimes, check out the anchor text report for one of our clients competitors – anyone would think they were an online pharmacy!

As a side note – if you have a forum or profile pages make sure they are moderated!!
