Should I worry that thousands of spam sites are linking to me?
-
I was browsing Google Webmaster Tools and discovered there are 117,301 links to my site— mostly from very low-quality, spammy websites. I definitely did not solicit these links. I'm worried they are from a competitor trying to get me penalized by Google.
Should I be worried about this?
-
Oh that's a good idea. I just tried it (link) and it actually doesn't seem so bad
-
You are welcome!
I suggest trying the anchor text report in Open Site Explorer - this should help you group spam links by anchor text.
-
Thank you Joe. This is insanely helpful.
I have not seen any dramatic drops in ranking but this has me concerned.
I've also noticed that recently very spammy Tweets referencing my site (sitebuilderreport.com) have been published: https://twitter.com/search?q=sitebuilderreport
Also troubling is that a number of the linking sites have porn-related domain names. That seems inherently spammy.
I'm having trouble tracking down the actual links using GWT to check the anchor text. So I'll get back on that.
-
Hi Steven,
This does sound like it could be a negative SEO campaign, are you seeing spammy anchor text with these links?
Google is effective at eliminating any negative impact caused by such campaigns but they are not always perfect. Are you seeing evidence that this is effectively harming your SEO? If you believe it is being effective, Google suggest you report it in the webmaster forums or by contacting John Mueller (https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts) and they will look into the situation. Check out this Moz blog post 'preparing for negative SEO' for more information and tips for how to address this situation.
As a precaution, I recommend submitting these spammy links to Google's disavow tool.
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
-
How can I stop a tracking link from being indexed while still passing link equity?
I have a marketing campaign landing page and it uses a tracking URL to track clicks. The tracking links look something like this: http://this-is-the-origin-url.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com/ The problem is that Google is indexing these links as pages in the SERPs. Of course when they get indexed and then clicked, they show a 400 error because the /clkn/ link doesn't represent an actual page with content on it. The tracking link is set up to instantly 301 redirect to http://destination-url.com. Right now my dev team has blocked these links from crawlers by adding Disallow: /clkn/ in the robots.txt file, however, this blocks the flow of link equity to the destination page. How can I stop these links from being indexed without blocking the flow of link equity to the destination URL?
Technical SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
Better to Remove Toxic/Low Quality Links Before Building New High Quality Links?
Recently an SEO audit from a reputable SEO firm identified almost 50% of the incoming links to my site as toxic, 40% suspicious and 5% of good quality. The SEO firm believes it imperative to remove links from the toxic domains. Should I remove toxic links before building new one? Or should we first work on building new links before removing the toxic ones? My site only has 442 subdomains with links pointing to it. I am concerned that there may be a drop in ranking if links from the toxic domains are removed before new quality ones are in place. For a bit of background my site has a MOZ Domain authority of 27, a Moz page authority of 38. It receives about 4,000 unique visitors per month through organic search. About 150 subdomains that link to my site have a Majestic SEO citation flow of zero and a Majestic SEO trust flow of zero. They are pretty low quality. However I don't know if I am better off removing them first or building new quality links before I disavow more than a third of the links to the site. Any ideas? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Link removal from search rank checking sites
I'm going through the link removal process for unnatural links to a site. While I'm able to identify the obvious link profile and seo-article links that Google wants removed, what should we do about the links that are generated by the various seo link investigation and ranking services? Example: http://www.seoprofiler.com/analyze/allamericanfencing.com This site (seoprofiler) automatically creates these links to web sites when it generates its reports. Are those links that need to be removed or disavowed, or will Google not care? I want to err on the side of caution, but don't know how to treat these types of pages. The site didn't ask for or lobby for those links, so it's "natural" in that sense, but they're not editorially earned either (except for happen to be ranking for a similar term). Does anyone have experience on this aspect of the unnatural link grooming process?
Technical SEO | | CHarkins0 -
How to handle mobile site with less pages than the main site?
We are developing a mobile version of our website that will utilize responsive design/dynamic serving. About 70% of the main website will be included in the mobile version. What (if anything) should be the redirect for pages not included in the mobile version of the site? Also - for one specific section users will be redirected from that page to the homepage, what is the redirect that should be used for this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
How to do a no follow on site search
We have a site search that is causing a huge amount of errors as the SEOmoz crawler is showing these as duplicate content. Our first thought was to do a no-follow on the site-search directory, but we realized that the site search is /site-search.aspx and URl strings appear at the end for hundreds of pages. How dow we/how can we no-follow an undetermined amount of URL strings?
Technical SEO | | Apptixweb0 -
I have a site that has both http:// and https:// versions indexed, e.g. https://www.homepage.com/ and http://www.homepage.com/. How do I de-index the https// versions without losing the link juice that is going to the https://homepage.com/ pages?
I can't 301 https// to http:// since there are some form pages that need to be https:// The site has 20,000 + pages so individually 301ing each page would be a nightmare. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | fthead90 -
Does the Referral Traffic from a Link Influence the SEO Value of that Link?
If a link exists, and nobody clicks on it, could it still be valuable for SEO? Say I have 1000 links on 500 sites with Domain Authority ranging from 35 to 80. Let's pretend that 900 of those links generate referral traffic. Let's assume that the remaining 100 links are spread between 10 domains of the 500, but nobody ever clicks on them. Are they still valuable? Should an SEO seek to earn more links like those, even though they don't earn referral traffic? Does Google take referral data into account in evaluating links? 5343313-zelda-rogers-albums-zelda-pictures-duh-what-else-would-they-be-picture3672t-link-looks-so-lonely.jpg Sad%20little%20link.jpg
Technical SEO | | glennfriesen1
