How To Remove Bad Incoming Links

Recently i discovered several domains scraping my content and hot linking to my domain.

What they have been doing is copying my content and publishing my homepage on a bad domain.

Here’s some screenshots showing my site copied so i’m ranking for porn terms.

Here’s the details of the owner and hosting provider which is public information.

BILLING CONTACT INFO
Moda Music LLC.
Nader Harb
3992 Bruton Ave.
Canton
Michigan
48188
US
Phone:         +1.2487551899
Email Address: modamusic@aol.com

HOSTING PROVIDER INFO
OrgName:        ThePlanet.com Internet Services, Inc.
OrgId:          TPCM
Address:        315 Capitol
Address:        Suite 205
City:           Houston
StateProv:      TX
PostalCode:     77002
Country:        US
RegDate:        1999-08-31
Updated:        2010-10-13
Ref:            http://whois.arin.net/rest/org/TPCM

I contacted the owner who stated he would deal with it last week but never did.

I’m looking in to it. It’ll be taken care of.

Domain

Here’s the email i received back from the domain manager.

Hello,

Thanks for contacting Name.com with this complaint. Please note that Name.com does not own this domain and is not the legal owner (also called the registrant) of this domain.

If you feel the website violates any applicable copyright laws, providing a properly formatted Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or “DMCA”, complaint to the web host provider and registrant may be the best way to proceed.

You can find more information about the scope and application of DMCA complaints at www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf.

Unlike Name.com, the web host and registrant have access to and can directly affect the content of this domain. I have reprinted the contact information of both parties below for your convenience.

Disavow Links

Google doesn’t have a tool at the moment to report bad incoming links so i’ve had to take the old route and request a DMCA takedown notice amongst other things.

Update!

Read more about Google’s Disavow Bad Link Tool.

The tool enables you to disavow incoming links by adding a url for a:

• Page
• Directory
• Domain

Here’s a screenshot:

Finding Bad Links

There’s many ways you can easily find bad links.

You can use the link tool feature in Bing, Google Webmaster Tools or any of the professional tools below to quickly find bad links.

Then its simply a matter of reporting the one’s infringing on your copyright using different DMCA take down notices.

There’s other tools which make it easier to quickly find low quality links like:

• Bings Link Explorer
• Ahrefs Site Explorer
• Open Site Explorer

Once you have the links, you can easily enter them into Bing’s Disavow tool or contact them directly for removal.

Bing has gained 5% of the search market share over the last month and rightly so in my opinion.

They provide useful Webmaster Tools and you can also email them if you need help with anything unlike Google.

This is an excellent tool added by the Bing team defeating Google Webmaster tools in this area….i have seen webmasters turning towards Bing as it seems the Bing team have been more responsive towards webmasters.

Why you should focus on Bing

• Resource: Finding & removing unnatural links

Negative SEO

Here’s what Google’s head of webspam has to say about negative SEO and disavowing links.

Google is probably considering this option of disowning links and Cutts acknowledged the fact that negative SEO is a major concern among people. Google accepts the possibility of negative SEO, but categorizes it as difficult. May be within a few months it will enable disavowing links.

How about you?

Ever checked your incoming links and discovered your content has been scraped?

Have you tried the new tools Bing developed for webmasters? What do you think of them compared to Google’s tools?