Question about spammy links to 404 Pages we never created ...

[WhittingtonConsulting]

FYI I'm a beginner within the company, so this might be a basic question, but ...I was going through open site explorer and checking www.partnermd.com for opportunities to reclaim links and I found a bunch of 404 pages that we never created that had nothing to do with the business. Out of curiousity, I plugged in one of the weird links like this one:http://www.partnermd.com/images/2015-best-space-heater-best-wers.html  into open site explorer and found several bad spammy links pointing to it. When I clicked on one of them I got a notice that the site might have been hacked.I did some research and it looks like Google doesn't penalize you for spammy links to 404 pages, but how do we prevent this from occurring in the first place if possible?

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi,

Although I agree with Andy Drinkwater, yet I would still go ahead and disavow these links in time. It's the right thing to do, you never know if the next Google update starts looking at these spammy links as well.

Always do the right thing first, don't wait for to react to the situation when it arrives.

I hope this helps, feel free to respond if you have further questions.

Best Regards,

Vijay

[BlueCorona]

I agree with Andy.

This shouldn't be harmful to your website or your organic rankings. But, it will be extremely difficult to stop other websites from linking to you.

I would monitor your backlinks on a regular basis to see if anything seems very abnormal.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

This is quite common for sites that are hacked and you then end up with these really strange spam links pointing to you.

The good news is, this won't do any harm to you. The bad news is, it's virtually impossible to stop someone else linking to you - especially so if it's a hacked site.

I would advise just keeping an eye on them and if you think it's a problem, just disavow the sites that are linking to you.

-Andy