Advice Please: Dodgy site with 1000s of links to mine...

[Christopher Smith]

Hi everyone, first post as I just joined this forum 5 minutes ago. I really need some help with a problem I've been having with my company website thefootballnation for a few months now.

Recently, when using Webmaster Tools I noticed that a random Italian camping website called roccadeitramonti has over 200,000 links to our website. It was actually 180,000 a few months ago but they are regularly increasing.

We've never used a dodgy SEO agency or anything as I do all the work myself, and it appears that this Italian website has likely been hacked. To top it off, their links to our site actually then redirect to a Spanish site called soccerlord which sells football boots - something we find it notoriously difficult to rank on.

At the moment we don't even rank in Google's top 120 for the keyword football boots, despite ranking in the first page for other key products we sell - so I'm pretty positive that we're being penalised by Google because of all these poor quality links from this dodgy website.

I have tried searching for a solution to this myself and I submitted a disavow request in Webmaster Tools for the domain roccadeitramonti, which was received successfully. However, the links continue to grow & it still continues to show up in webmaster tools.

Other local businesses with a much smaller selection of football boots than we have continue to rank for those keywords, but we can't get near it.

If anyone has any advice I would massively appreciate it. Could it just be a matter of patience, does disavow take a while to kick in?

Thanks a lot everyone
Chris

 

[I'm H]

Could you give some examples of the links which are pointing to the site Chris

 

[Christopher Smith]

Hi Adam, thanks for replying. I can't post links on this forum yet as my post count is under 10. I tried to post a screengrab but again I think this forum won't let me do that yet.

This might look a little confusing, but I've tried to write a link underneath without it flagging up.

roccadeitramonti(dot)it(slash)parks(dot)asp?adidas-micoach-speed-cell-for-iPhone-ipod-touch

They all begin with roccadeitramonti(dot)it(slash)parks(dot)asp? and then just lift word for word urls from our website and add them on. In addition to this if you visit roccadeitramonti(dot)it(slash)parks(dot)asp? without adding anything on at all it simply goes to our homepage without actually changing the url in the browser to ours.

Sorry if that seems a little confusing, not being able to put links in messages yet is a bit restrictive,

Cheers
Chris

 

[I'm H]

Looks to me a little like they are hijacking your DNS or scraping your site as you can see from pages like this :

Football Teamwear | Football Team Kits | Adidas | Errea | Joma | Uhlsport | Umbro | thefootballnation.co.uk

I assume thats your site but being displayed through their URL ? Have you checked your server logs to check access reports, its likely could simply block their scrapers or block their IPs to stop them from scraping but it will take some investigating.

You can see all the indexed pages being generated by this parks.asp file on their server :

Google

Could it be hindering your campaign, maybe......maybe not.......whether it be through Backlink infection of indeed some form of Duplicate content issue. Its hard to say but my first port of call would be preventing them accessing/scrapping or doing what ever they are to capture the site.

 

[Christopher Smith]

Yeah that's our site through their url - bit annoying.

It was the duplicate content that I was particularly worried about that might be affecting our seo, then again maybe football boots is just much much harder to rank on than some of the other stuff.

Thanks for your advice, it perhaps goes a little beyond my technical abilities unfortunately, is there a tool you could recommend to block their scrapers or IPs once I've investigated? I maintain the site through a WYSIWYG editor as I don't have much knowledge of html coding.

Thanks again, appreciate you taking the time to try to help.
Chris

 

[I'm H]

Hi Chris,

It could very well be the case of being hugely competitive but these kind of things need to be resolved or at least looked into, left alone could mean bigger problems further down the line.

If your not a technical admin then id recommend speaking to your developer or server admin, your server admin/host should be able to identify whats happening and block their IP ranges at server firewall level. Depending on how its being down if its a live capture of the site it will basically render their file useless and all URL's will fail, if however they are caching the entire capture then by blocking them at least you are preventing more URL's from being crawled/stolen.

Of which the Disavow tool should come in handy once you've stopped it at the source, it could very well be that Rocca dei Tramonti have been hacked and who ever has defaced it has decided to harness their resources to abuse you.

Have you tried contacting Rocca to see if they are aware of it ?

 

[Christopher Smith]

Several times I'm afraid. Looks as though their site is very much neglected now, full of dead links and posts dating back to 2011. 3 emails with no response so I'm not holding my breath on them doing anything about it.

I'll get in touch with our webhost & the webmaster that built the site for us a few years back and see if they can do anything about detecting/blocking these scrapers/IPs.

Once again, thanks for all the advice.
Chris