My name is Troy, Web Developer for Roadmaster USA

The previous web dude had haphazardly used a forum tool (IPBoard?) as a knowledgebase. Posting was "blocked" yet people were still able to register and set up profiles, creating links and god knows what to some very bad sites on the net. Some sites on the net now have links to our site; these are mostly spammy sites, sick porn, fake pharmaceutical sites, etc.

Needless to say (I believe) that our pagerank has suffered because of this, even though the actual crap on our site was only online for a short amount of time before it was detected.

I've tried to use the google webmaster removal tool and have had the /forums/ url removed from listings, and also set up robots.txt to not index that directory, but this does nothing for the myriad dynamic urls that are out on the net (just search roadmasterusa.com and go at least 5-7 pages in) that are possibly killing our reputation.

Has anyone ran into this before? Any quickfixes? How likely is it that owners of the spammy crappy site will remove listings upon request, or are they just going to dump my email into a spam database?

Thanks for your time,
Troy Oltmanns

links TO your pages only serve to raise the useless toolbar PR value, they DO NOT "take it away"
and content on your site is absolutely nothing to do with PR.

I'd suggest turning off the silly green bar, and focus on something useful instead.

Google have explained that you should not worry about those things which you do not have control. Yes if from your site any porn or fake pharma attached than this is the point of worry.

So just build the quality content and build for your users.

Take Care.

These problems should not affect your PR. More likely you lost some links over time and some other links lost their PR.

I do think you should try to resolve the problem with bad websites linking to you though. Google does claim the idealistic stance that things done offsite shouldn't be able to hurt your rankings. I wouldn't be so sure about that though. They rely on those backlinks to tell them a lot about a website. You should try to contact those websites (from a disposable e-mail address) and politely ask them to remove the link. Making legal threats works for large companies when they want a link removed from somewhere. So that might be worth trying. Beyond that you should try to dillute those bad links with lots of good, quality links. If you have a strong enough link profile, any bad links have very little effect.

There is a still a good chance that those links won't hurt your site, but it's best to be safe and take no chances. You don't want your website associated with that kind of content in any way. That is for both ranking and reputation reasons.

Hi,
At first - check your website and remove all bad link if you find them, remove all links on your website to the forum with spam links.
After that send a message with review request through the Google Webmaster Panel and explain the situation. Usually it helps and soon PR of your website will return.

I doubt the links can do any harm, only good.