: Will a client's site be penalized by another site redirecting and false meta? I am building a site for a client, and i have noticed that their former web developer has another site that simply

@Berumen354

If the former developer is just forwarding the domain to the customers existing site and there isn't any valuable content on the former developers site then there is a chance that he could be negatively affecting your clients site as it would be seen as a non-organic and invalid spam type link.

To start with as @closetnoc points out the first step is for the company to get their lawyers involved and to try to have the former developer stop the redirect and linking to the current site. Failing that you can use the Google Disavow tool which is designed for situations like this where a bad backlink you have no control over is affecting the sites ranking. This should be used sparingly as it is only a temporary measure and Google expects that you have tried other ways first to get rid of the back link but it is there in case your clients have no luck having the back link removed. How it is affecting the site there is no real way to know for certain as Google doesn't announce how a certain back link is affecting the ranking of a particular site but as it is not an organic value adding and context reasonable link then it should not be back linking to your clients site and so should be removed as soon as possible.

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