Free Host Microsite Spam- How Do They Affect Your Site And How To Eliminate Them

Building effective links is a necessity for every site- or at least a site that wants to be successful. There are so many ways of doing the linking tasks effectively but some are just unnatural and unhealthy for your website. One of these methods that were very common in the past is the use of free host microsite spam links. They were previously used to build links to a site but it goes against the quality guidelines set by Google. The search engine therefore treated them as unnatural.

While it is common knowledge that Google can trust these links, no one knows whether the Penguin algorithm can find them and use them to lower Google’s trust in your link profile or not. Well, there are speculations that it can possibly do this but then not at a very strict level. This is sort of a relief to some people but then once Google updates the algorithm, many sites will witness dramatic drops in ranking. On top of that these sites will be suppressed by Penguin until they have the links cleaned up.

What exactly is a free host microsite spam?

Before analyzing the process of cleaning up these spam links it is probably best to understand what these so called free host microsite spam links are. With the increasing number of webhosts like BlogSpot, Tumblr, WordPress and so forth, it is possible to create a free website very easily. There is a sneaky strategy that was employed back in the day to improve SEO ranking. A website owner would create several websites on these free platforms and then link them back to the main site by using an anchor text that is the keyword-rich.

Each of the free website will have one or more short articles that use a certain keyword to link back to the main site. In a number of cases the spam would be more detailed to the extent that even the free host sites are able to link back to each other. The end result is something that looks like a ‘link wheel’. In some other cases, the SEO Company that created the link will connect to these free host microsites from some high Page Rank sites that are gotten by purchasing expired domains.

It is a really clever internet and mobile marketing strategy and it does work. This is until Google catches up. If you have this main site that you cannot afford to have penalized or demoted by the Penguin algorithm for months on end then you definitely do not want to use this tactic. You can proceed to eliminating these spam links.

Detect the links

By using Webmaster Tools, Open Site Explorer, Majestic and similar devices you can find the links. Nevertheless, you will have access to no more than 10 percent of the links. Google is able to detect a whole lot of other links that might not be listed for you by Webmaster. The best way to find all the links is to:

-  Ask your SEO company (the one that did the linking) to provide you with a list

-  Use Google Analytics Referral Traffic- check the list of referrals to your site to see whether you can find free host microsite spam

-  Check the microsites- exhausting and frustrating, but it will work. Create list of all the known free host microsites and a separate list of the possible keywords that could have been used. Next, create a big list of possible microsites that could have been built and by using something like Scrapebox you can crawl each of the domains to check if they exist and whether they link back to your site.

Eliminating the links

Renouncing these links at a domain level is the easiest option if you are not dealing with a manual penalty. Many free host microsite spam sites are easy to remove. A majority of the free hosts have an option for you to report spam. The sites will sometimes be removed quite fast but other times it will take a long time.

Another option, especially if you are facing a manual penalty, is to take screenshots of the form submissions when reporting. The screenshots will be shared with the web spam team notifying them that it was not possible to contact the owner of the site as they are spam but that works are underway o remove them. The next step would be to disavow at the domain level. If you are sure that you have a pile of spam from one specific free host then you can disavow the whole domain. It is really a lot of work but it will pay off once Google starts wrecking havoc on people’s websites. You do not want yours to be among those that suffer a rank demotion, right? It is best to start doing that work now.