Block sites from linking to my site

[Swedenbetting]

As my traffic and links to my site has increased so has the number of spam sites linking to my site. Does this needs to be adressed, like should I block these sites from linking to my site? And how, if so? And how do I determine if these links are actually causing an issue for my sites rating?

[Isaiah]

Unfortunately, you cannot block sites to link to your site.

But, you can use google's disavow tool to 'report' these, although its operation is in question nowadays.

To determine if these links are spam and hurting your rankings, check for strange domain names, if they are on the same business or not a related niche with yours, if these are site-wide links, linking text etc. I guess it's easy to find out if they are really spammy links.

[sweetbet]

Although you can't stop sites from linking to your site, you can use the cPanel IP Blocker to disallow an ip address or a range of ip addresses from accessing your site, especially if the other sites are hotlinking your images or an ip address is being used to scrape or hack into your site.

[casinoportal]

Sites linking to you are unlikely to and shouldn't cause any harm imo, as it is something you have no control over. I would still use Google's disavow tool to be on the safe side though.

[chorleynewman]

The only tool you should be working on is Google Search Console (same for other search engines if you care about ranking there).

Google et al. are well aware of negative SEO and have introduced their disavowal tools to offer at least some protection from it. Hence, make sure you have bookmarked their:

https://support.google.com/webmaster.../2648487?hl=en

and https://www.google.com/webmasters/to...nks-main?pli=1

Main problem with bad backlinks or negative SEO is that attackers can mask them by blocking access to Ahrefs, Majestic, Semrush etc. crawlers and only allowing Google bots to access them. So, you need to up your game once you start getting a feel that your site is getting targeted.

[Swedenbetting]

Thank you very much for this! I think I know how and where to start now!