Spammy Blog Link Network

By Peter Boyd on December 19, 2016 in SEO 

We use Google Search Console to see inbound links to our website. Every month we review the data to see where new links are coming from. Our review helps us determine good links from bad and, if necessary, we disavow any spurious links.

Over the last few months we have noticed odd links to paperstreet.com from a network of websites that appear to be related. These links are poor quality (to put it nicely)… really they are “crap” links. The network these links are coming from is basically a “crap” blog of spun content.

All of these poor quality websites are similar. They have scraped content that is merged with other scraped content to form gibberish legal articles. The articles link to various websites, not just paperstreet.com.

Blog Network Characteristics

Overall this link network shares commonalities and is probably the work of the same organization. Ideally, this article “outs” the tactics of whoever is producing these crap sites. Perhaps Google will take notice and simply devalue all their efforts. More sites are coming online each week, but overall they share a lot of the same characteristics:

1. Domain: The domain is related to legal (lawyer, law firm, or attorney) and registered within the last year.
2. Content: The content appears to be scraped from other websites and merged together to form some type of gibberish, non-sensible article. The content can include scraped photos, text, and links. Sometimes it goes as far as putting in related links. Since the content is merged automatically, it is basically gibberish.
3. Design and Platform: They are WordPress websites with a default template design.
4. Site Owner: The owner of the website is supposedly in India. The registrants are randomized, probably fake addresses and names. They have put a lot of effort into making unique registrants for these websites.
5. Hosting: They are hosted on GoDaddy and/or Incapsula, Inc. (typically in the 107.154.105.XXX range, 107.154.106.XXX range, 184.168.221.XXX, 192.230.XXX.XXX, and 199.83.129.XXX range).

Goal of the Network

I assume the goal of this network is to gain inbound links to another site. Unfortunately, our website is listed in the mix (along with a lot of our friendly competitors). We have disavowed all links from these websites, but unfortunately that only does so much, as this link network is continually expanding even with our disavow efforts of previously uncovered bad links.

The List of Bad Links

These websites are still online at the time of writing this blog post and are ones we have identified as spammy or “crap” links.

Why Write this Post?

Hopefully this article gains attention with Google and the websites listed above, and others like it, are banned (or at least no value is passed along). PaperStreet has already disavowed them.

Suggestions for You

To determine if you are a victim of this link circle, check out the websites above and run a search for your domain and/or company name. If you are in the legal marketing arena, you are most likely caught up in this mess. We have found links to all of our friendly competitors at GoBlackFin, Findlaw, Martindale, ModernFirm, Zola / Amicus, Dan Gilroy, iLawyerMarketing, LawPromo and more.

PaperStreet continually reviews the backlink profile of our SEO clients on a quarterly basis but if you are not yet an SEO client, you can also download a list of your back links from Google directly. Simply signup, or sign-in, to your Google Webmaster Tools accounts. You can then download your back link chart and review any inbound links.

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