Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Spammy links
-
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!
-
Hi Russ,
Did you read the question? We can't find out where the links are coming from....
-
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
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.
-
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.
-
Yep, the links are there. It's not the typical Analytics spam
-
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.
-
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,
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
When conducting a link building strategy does it matter the country the link is from?
We are a UK business and if we have links mostly from US based blogs and websites does this penalise us. The links are from relevant websites and topics. Should we be focusing on .co.uk sites
Link Building | | Caffeine_Marketing1 -
Spammy no follow backlinks - what should I do?
There is a individual/company that is creating lots of spam sites in my niche. It doesn't seem that they are trying to rank for any keywords, so I'm a little confused as to their purpose, but here's what they're doing. They scrape the top 10 Google results for each keyword and create a page - so if the niche is "widgets", they scrape the top 10 ranked sites for 'widgets', 'blue widgets', 'red widgets', and so on. A 'results' page is created for each keyword, which is linked from a home page. The results page always contains 10 websites - text is the site metadescription or similar. Each website gets a nofollow link back with the page title used as the anchor text. The host sites all have the keyword in the domain name - e.g www.widgetsxyz.com. The sites are thrown together but interestingly have a very crappy but individual logo (like 90's clipart). The host sites all have high DA/PA due to some very extensive link spam pointing to the sites, with very targeted keywords. There is seemingly no purpose to these sites that I can see - no other 'followed' links on the page or site. Whoever is doing this is churning out tens, if not hundreds of these sites. Any ideas what might be going on here, and whether I should be disavowing these sites (even though no follow). The fear is that they could switch the links to do follow, and get all the major players penalised in one fell swoop. ???
Link Building | | johnohara0 -
What is the best way to remove a link that redirects to a spammy site?
I've got a new client and I'm trying to clean up their backlinks. There are several links that all redirect to this spam site http://www.expert-lender.com. All of the websites appear to be real, i.e. http://www.sammorganhomes.com/ but the actual links i.e http://www.sammorganhomes.com/wp-fav/backup/supplement/semitruckleasing.html are in a sub-directory and redirect to the spam site. I don't know if these links were from the previous SEO company or if they paid someone to create these or if these sites have been hacked. Can anyone tell me what is going on here and what should I tell these site owners?
Link Building | | Total-Design-Shop0 -
What count as irrelevant links?
I recently had a link audit done for a client selling mechanical parts. This client supplies to the mining and construction industries. The link audit showed all links on mining or construction sites as irrelevant. When I questioned about it, they explained that my client is in the mechanical parts industry and therefor Google would penalize me as those count as irrelevant links. I don't agree, but need an expert opinion. Can anyone help?
Link Building | | seocoza0 -
Reciprocal links
Are they worth anything, if they are from relevant sites? I'm I better off avoiding linking back wherever possible?
Link Building | | littlesthobo0 -
Linking to sites that link to porn or casinos, my site getting penalized?
I have some link exchanges with some sites to get web traffic but when i ran the bad neighborhood link checker, i found that one site links to some casinos and another site has one link to a porn site. Is this getting me penalized? should i remove the links to these sites? Thanks, Ron
Link Building | | Ron100 -
Forum Signature Links
After the new update from google, are Forum Signature Links still very good to use linkbuliding or?
Link Building | | Agger0