My legit inbound link turned into spam link after their site was hacked

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My legit inbound link turned into spam link after their site was hacked

jazzyo

12:01 pm on Dec 16, 2013 (gmt 0)

What should I do I have a really good link created by someone linking on a blue widget site to my blue widget site but moronic hackers have hacker there wordpress site. In ahrefs now I get hundreds of url link which for me just show up as the homepage because they are probably only meant for google bot with the url and then /pills 50mg and all that rubbish.
What should I do..
With no contact page I tried just posting a comment on the about page explaining and things they could try to do to fix it... but no doubt it being wordpress again there comment page will be full of spam.
no whois email available either...

update: Just went a little deeper into the hacked pages and it seems these pages have hundreds of links pointing to them from other spam pages and it looks as though the effected site has been penalized with a pr of 0.

Such a shame.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 12:25 pm (utc) on Dec 16, 2013]

netmeg

1:13 pm on Dec 16, 2013 (gmt 0)

Disavow it for now. You can un-disavow it later after the site is cleaned up (un-disavow? avow? I dunno)

Lame_Wolf

3:43 pm on Dec 16, 2013 (gmt 0)

Have you tried looking at the whois database? Sometimes that will show a contactable email address.
Or, contact the hosting provider and ask them to get the owner to contact you because their site has been hacked.

martinibuster

4:19 pm on Dec 16, 2013 (gmt 0)

no whois email available either...

Are you sure? All privacy services list a way to contact the domain name registrant. It's often something like privacy1234ABCD@example.org, an email addy that gets forwarded to the registrant.

The other way to contact the owners are to identify the name of the company or person responsible for the site then find them on Facebook, LinkedIn or other social media site. Contact them from there.

There are many other methods for identifying a domain name contact but the two listed above should suffice.

Good luck!

phranque

10:55 pm on Dec 16, 2013 (gmt 0)

welcome to WebmasterWorld, jazzyo!

i agree with netmeg - do a domain disavow until the hack is cleaned up.

lucy24

11:16 pm on Dec 16, 2013 (gmt 0)

Tangential question: If the site has no visible contact info and the hack has been around long enough to pick up hundreds of backrefs, is it really safe to maintain a connection with them anyway?

jazzyo

1:29 pm on Dec 17, 2013 (gmt 0)

thanks people! managed to finally find a whois email and the website owners were very appreciative that I helped them out.. by looks things it happened in November because ahrefs picks up big climb in links form then on. Will disavow the domain and once it clean un disavow it thanks.

n0tSEO

1:10 pm on Dec 18, 2013 (gmt 0)

Hi jazzyo,

Glad to hear you found a way out of the situation. I would advise to let the webmaster know if there's potential for a relationship so they can add a rel=nofollow to their link to your site until things clear up.

I found that honest communication oftentimes works better than a disavow tool.