Could someone be sabataging my site by bad backlinks?

[infinart]

Hello,

As I have said before I am new to SEO and especially new to this type of software. I am trialing MOZ, ahrefs and MajesticSEO. I just used the Site Explorer on ahrefs and it showed me that a bunch of backlinks was created today but I haven't engaged anyone in "SEO" for many months.

Why would this be? See the image for a screenshot.

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[infinart]

Cheers. Makes sense.

[CustomButtonCo.com]

Your going to have to disavow tool those links and you might want to take a big chunk of your links out and start over. Like Matt Cutts said use it like a Machete not like a Scalpel.

Yet another bit to read http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-link-spamming-google-for-a-specific-time-period-then-mass-disavow-those-links-179445

[infinart]

Thanks Lynn, I contacted an old SEO person and he explained that it was a mistake and that it was done in 2011. I wonder how many other mistakes were made!   I have found more than one strange occurrences-- actually I estimate over 100.  It's a no-wonder why my site got smashed by Google in May last year.
I will have to go through and cull and disavow them all.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Carl,

Its hard to say for sure, but those links look to me like the kind of stuff you get with the 200 dollars for 500 back links type services. Keep in mind that any link explorer application is not showing you links that were created today, just links that were first discovered by that application today, so the links could be days, weeks or even months old depending on how often the pages of the site are crawled by the app. As a general rule lower value sites with fewer incoming links are crawled less often, and those look mainly like low value article sites. Also keep in mind that if you had a company doing this kind of work for you at one point, these links are often automated to a degree and could be coming online weeks/months after the initial order was placed.

In view of all that, I would think that chef link might just be a mistake from the same service, somehow your link got attached to a different site/project or something like that. If your link profile is full of those kind of links yes you will probably be having trouble ranking and maybe disavowing as Michael suggests is a good idea (don't expect quick gains though...).

[infinart]

Thanks but why are they occurring? What is causing them to appear?

[MickEdwards]

If you are getting links like this I would disavow the domains responsible.