Getting random spammy backlinks

[PaulEchere]

Hi,

I seem to be getting a lot of strange new spammy backlinks (~20 per week). These seems to be linking to my website in random meaningless chunks of texts or gigantic lists of links to various (in no way related) websites.
It is worth disawow those links or you would say that it's fine to let them be?

Thanks,

[chaumi]

Instinct says disavow. Though they're possibly not harming you, they logically also won't be helping.

[wonderpunter]

Right now i ihave seen a citation spammer popup with a ton of domains, and most gambling sites seem to be listged in the spam, scraping content then reposting..

[PaulEchere]

Right now i ihave seen a citation spammer popup with a ton of domains, and most gambling sites seem to be listged in the spam, scraping content then reposting..

Looks to be the case, since the content my links appear makes no sense and seems to be some strange mixture of different posts / aticles.

[baldidiot]

Yeah I know exactly what you're referring to - seeing loads of these on pretty much all sites. Just junk like those image link sites.

If you look at the referring urls most aren't indexed by google so I wouldn't worry to much about them too much (ie: the big G knows they're nonsense).

[potentialeight]

I've seen people in other SEO spaces talking about this type of spam. The school of thought seems to be that it's based on the idea that linking out to high-level sources in a niche or industry is often a good SEO practice for citations, etc. I would assume that Google knows what's going on and that disavowing probably isn't worth the effort in terms of playing whack a mole so much, but I can understand why someone would do it anyway.

[CasinosBroker]

Hi,

I seem to be getting a lot of strange new spammy backlinks (~20 per week). These seems to be linking to my website in random meaningless chunks of texts or gigantic lists of links to various (in no way related) websites.
It is worth disawow those links or you would say that it's fine to let them be?

Thanks,

Same here.

I'm getting random and new spammy backlinks. I'm using: Google’s Disavow Tool to fix this unpleasant issue.

Better to be safe, then sorry (later down the road).

[gm2891]

Tools like LinkResearchTools can tell you if sites that are linking to you are toxic. Google, I reckon, has even more advanced methods and technologies to determine such things. I also believe that Google has a special database with **** sites created on analysing websites that webmasters disavow. This makes reason to believe that if 1000 webmasters disavow an XWZ site URL, but you do not, it means you're belonging to the same sort of sites and are happy to have such backlinks. Consequently, I think the best bet is to disavow anything that looks untrusty to you including those links that are not in your search console but are visible on Ahrefs, Semrush, etc. Unless you can manage to build good links faster than those bad ones appear so the number of good domains is greater than bad ones. But still.

[Juan Roman]

This makes reason to believe that if 1000 webmasters disavow an XWZ site URL, but you do not, it means you're belonging to the same sort of sites and are happy to have such backlinks.

Shouldn't Google already know these are spamy backlinks based on the 1,000 webmasters disawowing them and disregard them based on that when evaluating your site's backlinks even if you do not use disawow?

[chaumi]

Shouldn't Google already know these are spamy backlinks based on the 1,000 webmasters disawowing them and disregard them based on that when evaluating your site's backlinks even if you do not use disawow?

Two schools of thought......

I'm Google.

1. I'm clever............these are spammy backlinks. Why? 1,000 other webmasters disawowed them and and I'm going to just disregard them based on that when evaluating any other site's backlinks even if they do not use disawow.

2. I'm clever........but not quite as clever in some circumstances as you think. I gave you a tool to take care of this. It's been widely publicized and is aged/trustworthy. Many webmasters use it. You should be taking care of your site yourself, not relying on us to do it. That's why we gave it to you.


The point? In the absence of outright proof one way or another, but the fallout from ignoring a potential event could be painful, when the action you need to take costs nothing (in pure financial terms, though recognize the need to balance the time cost)...then it would seem sensible/prudent/wise to just do it. Or at a minimum consider the risk and take a balanced view, and either accept or negate the risk and take the consequences either way.

In this specific case, no one knows (except maybe those who disavowed a bunch of crap links under controlled conditions where they knew they had been disavowed by many others beforehand...an unlikely scenario and the results could have been influenced unknowingly by multiple other factors too)

[Juan Roman]

To sum it up: better safe than sorry Makes perfect sense.

On that note, can you recommend a free (or cheap) tool to identify toxic backlinks? I'd rather not click every one of those and check where it leads.

[potentialeight]

Shouldn't Google already know these are spamy backlinks based on the 1,000 webmasters disawowing them and disregard them based on that when evaluating your site's backlinks even if you do not use disawow?

I feel the same way, but I also remember when everyone thought Google would never penalize someone for receiving spam links because it could be used to attack competitors...

[gm2891]

Probably G knows that these links are spammy based on the data they collect through this disavow tool, but they can not properly determine whether these links are spammy for a particular site and that is why the disavow tool is there for webmasters to tell them not to count these links. In other words, to help them to work it out (this is just my assumption).

[gm2891]

Juan Roman

To see your toxic links you can get a Linkreserch tools subscription for 700 EUR that will allow you to get them all and automatically create a disavow file. Alternatively, get their free trial, but in this case, they won't allow you to get these links all at once. You'll need to copy them one by one and paste them into a notepad. However, if you need advice on how to get them all out in the free trial, I can help.

[chaumi]

...and to cap it from personal experience (although not exactly proof one way or the other due to potential impact/contribution of multiple other factors).....

My site had dropped about 10 positions over the year for home page ranking. I had help and advice from someone not a million miles away from this thread to identify crap links and disavow...and it's crept back up. There could be many other reasons for that...but on balance it made sense to do it and may have contributed to more positive outcomes.

Lots you have to do for SEO, and really it takes doing it all, but disavowing obvious crap makes sense as one of the elements.

[Lee1]

Personal opinion and from experience, but I like "toxic" backlinks.

It shows a more natural link profile. As mentioned above, Google most likely knows what are the "toxic" links.

As long as you have more relevant and branded links, there shouldn't be an issue

Every site gets "toxic" links as you have no control over other people's actions.

Embrace them

[BCGame Affiliates]

I think it boils down to your personal preference. My opinion that it is always better to tackle them and be safe, not sorry!