iGB Affiliate 65 Oct/Nov | Page 27

TRAFFIC to cause the most damage. The anchor text consists of terms such as Viagra, Cialis, money laundering, illegal drugs and porn. These links are nearly impossible to get removed completely because nine times out of 10 the webmaster isn’t aware their site has been hacked or has given up on the site and the hackers take it over to use for their own gain. These and similar examples were noticed every month when our casino site was ranking top for “mobile slots” and “mobile casino”. These trophy keywords have the potential to drive nearly 10,000 visits per month to a site. The average CPC if you’re bidding in Google AdWords would be $83.16 and $73.87, so you can see the advantage of your site being first for these keywords. Because of continued attacks our site has now dropped to page two for these keywords, which has a detrimental effect on our bottom line. Recovery tactics Now we’ve identified the bad backlinks within the profile we need to add them to a disavow file and submit them to Google. You can also try to get these links removed manually but, as stated before, it’s a very tedious and time- consuming task, which is why I would suggest disavowing these links at a root domain level and submitting your list to Google and other search engines. To Google, your site is just a number — they don’t care if you have just lost revenue or 10,000 searches per month. You’re just one of billions of websites and unless you tell them what links to discredit how would they know? Even once the disavow file is submitted, it c an take a while for Google to recrawl your site and the sites in the disavow file. So, because these jealous competitors Figure 1: Some black hat links, posted on an expired WordPress theme, that point to one of the author’s operator sites, Touchmobilecasino.co.uk iGB Affiliate Issue 65 OCT/NOV 2017 23