Hundreds of spammy Indian links pointed at my site

[RacingJim]

Hi there, I'm recently getting hundreds of crappy spammy Indian links pointed at my sites, from domains such as:

domain:foodandme.in
domain premise.in
domain:notebookpc.in
domain:sakshambharat.in
domain:laptopforsale.in

Anyone getting similar rubbish? Any thoughts how to stop these sorts of things in the first place? is it scraper based and could I be doing more to stop this sort of thing?

[RacingJim]

Another thing I've noticed, I think they are coming from the same IP address. Apparently you can't disavow a whole IP address, well you can but it will only block links from the actual IP address, not any of the domains hosted on that IP.

I was also wondering, as the majority of these domains are .in , is there any way you can just disavow a whole domain extnsion e.g. with a wildcard like:

domain:*.in

It's pretty nightmarish going through a disavow list of 400+ domains, with about 100 new ones being added every few weeks.

[allfreechips]

if they are all the same IP maybee go after the host?

[RacingJim]

if they are all the same IP maybee go after the host?

Yeh I'll look into it, I haven't yet confirmed they are all the same IP but I'll do a sample of maybe 10-20 and see if they match up.

[baldidiot]

We've been getting tons recently. Mix of follow and nofollow, all junk scraping images or 'search result' type page. Tbh for the most part I ignore them, occasionally update the disavow if there's a lot or I get a bad feeling over it, but half the time they're gone within a week or two anyway.

On a vaguely related now recently we've also been hit with a ton of ghost links in ahrefs - links pointing to our sites with spammy anchors (viagra etc..) - but the page that has been picked up either doesn't have the link, or the page doesn't even exist. None show up in google or GWT though so I'm assuming it's some type of spam directed at link bots.

[universal4]

If they are mostly related to scraping and result type pages you could block the subnet at the server level and it might reduce it some, but the problem is sometimes the actual scraping takes place from one ip (server or home based ip) then the links or results based links will point from a different location. (if scraping is being done from same ip as the hosted links, it will stop them from scraping again)

Disavow the entire domains is likely best course of action most likely.

Rick

[TheGooner]

I recommend you start blocking IP access to your site from India ...
While I realise that not ALL Indian visitors will be bots, scrapers and scammers ... 99% will be.

[Progger]

https://cybermap.kaspersky.com/
http://map.norsecorp.com/#/

Pacman 2.0 - enjoy

[MannyBetting]

I recommend you start blocking IP access to your site from India ...
While I realise that not ALL Indian visitors will be bots, scrapers and scammers ... 99% will be.

But how else do you expect to get cheap SEO services, logo design and mobile apps?

[Former Member 14]

Rick has given some great suggestions

I block a lot of spammy hot-spots. Sure, not all people from these blocked countries are dodgy. More often than not, the majority are infected PC/Servers and have been hijacked, and are part of a botnet. I have securities in place to log and instantly ban certain activities. I often see my WP login page getting hammered every minute, each attempted with a different IP spread across all corners of the globe.

Have other traps in place which send dodgy IP's to ProjectHoneyPot.org. Also have security which filters UA (user agent) indentifiers. You'd be surprised (or maybe not) the number of fake Google, Bing, Yahoo bots out there. This trap slaps them. On top of that, I'd dare say 99% are use outdate browsers. Seems FireFox 40.0 is popular lately. So I block all browser that are more than 3 major updates old - these days people's browser are generally updated automatically. If your still using an outdated browser, then your suss on my list.

I also block Tor browser, Tor network and, cloud servers. Places like Amazonaws etc. Also have a block for Cloud Flare. Basically anyone not accessing my sites from a ISP is awarded an instant block. Then people who access via a ISP are scrutinised against other fliters.

Yes I probably seem hyper paranoid to most webmasters. But, when your business is at stake, and so to your income, then I believe taking the right action to minimise the damage these scum bags can do, isn't overkill, instead, it's being smart


To minimise scraping from Google cache etc, I've added:

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive" />

Since doing that last year, my scraped content has been drastically reduced.

Protecting my business from this crap, errodes into my work time. But, if I don't do it, then I'm at the mercy of these bastards!

[sweetbet]

That's excellent advice !!

I've just banned India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. A lot of suspicious traffic from there. I didn't ban China or Russia because I have Russian and Chinese pages, and I had a great high roller from Russia once

Which other countries are people banning and why?

[Progger]

Use cloudflare if u want block bad traffic on your page....u can still work with ip lists but this is a full-time-job.

[Former Member 14]

Use cloudflare

Don't you mean Crimeflare!

http://www.crimeflare.com/

CloudFlare is a venture-funded startup that routes around Internet abuse by acting as a reverse proxy. They also encourage illegality by allowing hackers, DDoSers, cyberbullies, and copyright pirates to hide behind their servers.By 2015, CloudFlare was even protecting websites that recruited for ISIS.

http://www.crimeflare.org/isis.html

Nope, pass, no thank you

[Progger]

Don't you mean Crimeflare!

i have more than 2 braincell, u not ?