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    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Link Building
    4. Spammy links

    Moz Q&A is closed.

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    Spammy links

    Link Building
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    • Happy-SEO
      Happy-SEO last edited by

      Hi Guys,

      I have a case which seems to occur more often for our customers. The websites of our customers seem to receive tons of backlinks from websites all over the world (China, Russia, Ukrain, etc).

      It’s spam we never asked for, we didn’t buy any dodgy linkbuilding packages or anything.

      Do any of you guys have experience with this matter? We try to disavow the links but it takes too much time and we will never manage to disavow 100% of all links.

      Examples are www.keukensduitsland.nl and www.m2beveiliging.nl

      Hope anyone has experience and maybe even solutions for this matter.

      Thanks!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • Happy-SEO
        Happy-SEO @rjonesx. 0 last edited by

        Hi Russ,

        Did you read the question? We can't find out where the links are coming from....

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • rjonesx. 0
          rjonesx. 0 @Happy-SEO last edited by

          The two sites you presented are wholly different cases...

          1. Sorry, but m2beveiliging.nl was hacked...

          Look at the backlinks you are receiving. They point to pages like...

          http://www.m2beveiliging.nl/aysg/kaa3g0wy.html

          Which no longer exist. But if we check the Google cache, we can see they are filled with

          http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.m2beveiliging.nl%2Faysg%2Fkaa3g0wy.html&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.m2beveiliging.nl%2Faysg%2Fkaa3g0wy.html&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.967j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

          The content translates to ... "Adidas soccer spike type, Adidas spike baseball order non-standard-size Free Shipping!"

          2. http://www.keukensduitsland.nl/ on the other hand received a ton of directory links. I dont know if you, an employee, or the client themselves did this, but is doubtful that it was intended to be malicious. All of these directory links originated in the last few weeks, matching up with the search in referring domains and links.

          • http://www.organicseooptimization.com/home_and_garden/kitchen/?p=28
          • http://www.geohweber.com/home_and_garden/kitchen/?p=28
          • http://systx-web.com/home_and_garden/kitchen/?p=14
          Happy-SEO 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Happy-SEO
            Happy-SEO last edited by

            I've uploaded some data of one of our new customers. They used to have only 6 backlinks. Within 1 day, the backlinkcount raised to about 50. All from spammy directories form China, Ukrain, Brazil, etc.

            So I'm talking about a real spam problem, not the typical spammy links in Analytics, copy of content or just a few % of all links referring to the website.

            An example of a linking domain: http://dokuo30.kuronowish.com/cgi-bin/oekaki/up.cgi

            I tend to think it has something to do with 404 page's being indexed.

            O3Fn4Dh uafkU5z

            rjonesx. 0 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • Happy-SEO
              Happy-SEO @matthew.dimmett last edited by

              Yep, the links are there. It's not the typical Analytics spam

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • Happy-SEO
                Happy-SEO @DmitriiK last edited by

                We all get 'some' spam but I'm talking about loads of links. Ahrefs tells us that only 8% of the links is from Holland. It's a Dutch website and most of the links come from Ukrain, China and Russia.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • solvid
                  solvid last edited by

                  Hi,

                  I agree with the guys. As soon as the website gets popular, authoritative and valuable, other websites tend to simply copy stuff that you produce, including whole paragraphs of content and sometimes they don't even bother removing the links from the content.

                  Try to disavow as many as you can, but don't spend all of your time on it. As Dmitrii said, it is important to keep your spam score low. Hence, try to focus on building quality links that will easily outweight spammy ones.

                  Thanks,

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • EGOL
                    EGOL last edited by

                    I have a domain that has been on the web for a long time.  It has hundreds of thousands of these links.  If you visit the pages where the links are placed they are rubbish directory-listings or mashup pages that contain paragraphs grabbed here and there from sites across the web.  The websites that host these pages are spam.

                    I have never disavowed any of them.  I don't worry a bit about them.  The only thing that I have done is add code to my htaccess file that strips parameters off of them.  Google has a service in Webmaster Tools that allows you to exclude parameters, but I'd rather handle it myself with htaccess than rely on Google to do it for me.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                    • matthew.dimmett
                      matthew.dimmett last edited by

                      Have you checked those pages to make sure there are actually links to your site on the referral path page you're seeing in analytics?

                      If they don't actually have links to your clients sites then it's possible they are just spamming your analytics. There are several ways to exclude this data from your analytics though. https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data

                      Hope that helps.

                      Happy-SEO 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                      • DmitriiK
                        DmitriiK last edited by

                        Hi there.

                        Well, it's quite usual for this to happen. It happens to every website, no matter what you do. Now, there is no really way to fix besides disavowing. And yes, it takes time and effort. However, here is a thing. Unless those spammy websites' backlinks are significant part of your backlink profile (i'd say more than 3-5%), it wouldn't affect your website "health". You can look at MOZ's spam score. If it's less than 3 - you're good.

                        So, to sum up - no, there is no way to fix it, but disavow. And the way to "fix" it without fixing it is to have large backlink profile with lots of quality backlinks to ensure that even if you have those spammy links, their share would be so small, it wouldn't matter to search engines.

                        Hope this makes sense.

                        Happy-SEO 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
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