208 Of 208 Farm Domains Tested Cloaked
A Link Farm Showed 1,000 Links To SEO Tools And A 404 To Google
We tested the farm behind a spam link wave. Rank tools saw links. Google got a missing page.
Illustration, Burning Bridges
Latest Reports All Reports
We Reported 2,835 Spam Domains And 88 Percent Of The Farm Was Still Up Three Weeks Later
Abuse reports, disavow files and a free removal form were the three ways out on offer. One did little, one may have done nothing and one was part of the trap.
A Spam Update Took 96 Percent Of A Directory's Impressions And The Cause Was Us
Impressions fell from about 1,000 a day to about 25 in two days. The pages stayed indexed. Here is what we had built wrong.
A Bot Swarm Read 2,132 Directory Pages Once Each And Left
One day brought 2,031 visits from Singapore to a directory that gets 30 at most. Every one wore the same browser fingerprint.
The Beats We Cover
Each beat is one way a site loses traffic to somebody else's work. A beat with no report yet is one we are still gathering evidence on.
Link Attacks And Link Farms
2 ReportsSpam link waves, cloaked farms and paid link networks that drag down the numbers a site is judged by.
Scrapers And Content Theft
1 ReportBots and people who copy a site's pages, listings or photos and publish them somewhere else.
Fake Reviews And Listing Hijacks
No Reports YetReview bombing, bought reviews and business profiles edited or claimed by someone who does not own them.
False Takedown And Copyright Claims
No Reports YetRemoval notices filed to knock a rival page out of search with no real claim behind them.
Hacked Sites And Injected Spam
No Reports YetBreak ins that plant pages, links or redirects on a site its owner still thinks is clean.
Expired Domain And Redirect Abuse
No Reports YetOld domains bought for their history and pointed at something their links never meant to support.
Bot And Click Fraud
No Reports YetFake visits and fake ad clicks that spend a budget or bend the data a business steers by.
Search Update Fallout
1 ReportWhat search engine updates take away, why, and how to tell an update from an attack.
How A Report Is Built
What Happened
One thing that cost a site its traffic, told from logs, crawl data and Search Console exports we hold.
How To Spot It
The signs a site owner can check in an afternoon, with the numbers we saw so you know what normal looks like.
What To Do About It
The fix in order, what we tried that did nothing, and anything we got wrong along the way.
Who Writes Here
Agency owners who work with Clickflame. Each author page lists who they are, with outside sources you can check.
Anthony Limpert
Guy Tate
Justin Deleon
Brodie Childers
Vitor LindoSeen Something Done To A Site?
Lost rankings overnight, found your pages on a stranger's domain or got a takedown notice you did not earn. Tell the desk what you saw.