Big drops in website traffic?
It’s time to check your site – but here’s the kicker: Start with your outgoing links. You might not realize it, but these links could be silently damaging your SEO and traffic.
I recently crawled a site with 185,000 monthly visitors to test a new feature for Gone.Domains. It finds valuable domains with strong backlinks that can be leveraged for SEO improvements, new project launches, or domain resale.
As I reviewed the list of domains found from the crawled site, I noticed something alarming: high-authority domains that seemed to be linking to questionable sites. Specifically, many of these links led to adult industry websites. This was concerning, especially since the site I was analyzing was focused on digital topics and had a reputation for quality content.
Here’s what happened
The site had been hacked by a bot that created fake user profiles and inserted these shady outbound links. Hundreds of them. As a result, the site’s authority was used to push these adult websites, and over time, Google detected it and penalized the site.
Now, their rankings tanked and their visibility in search results dropped.
If you’re in this situation, it’s not just your SEO at risk—your business is too.
Google’s spam detection systems can automatically devalue sites with suspicious outgoing links. So, your rankings might drop, or worse, you might vanish from search results entirely.
What can you do to protect yourself?
Monitor your outgoing links closely.
Avoid linking to dubious sites, especially those involved in hacking, malware, or porn.
If you know a site has been penalized, remove those links ASAP.
It's all about maintaining a clean, ethical backlink profile.
Stay on the right side of SEO and watch your traffic thrive!
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