Never ending new links and our rank continues to plumet

[plahpoy]

HI everyone,

I've been having an issue with a severe drop in rankings (#2 to #36ish). All of my technicals seem to be ok, however I seem to be getting my images hotlinked (which I have killed in nginx) from these spam like pages that pull and link to an image on my site, then link again with a " . " for the anchor. Even more strange is that these pages are titled and marked up with the same titles and target key words as my site. For example, I just got a link yesterday from a site leadoptimiser - d o tt-  me which is IMO a junk site. The title of the page is the same as one of my pages, the page is pulling in images relevant to my page, however the image sources are repos EXCEPT for 2 images from my site which are hotlinked to my pages image and then an additional <a>.</a> link is placed to my website.

I have gotten over 1500 of these links in the past few months from all different domains but the website (layout etc) is always the same. I have been slowly disavowing some of them, but do not want to screw up anything in case these links are already being discounted by G as spam and not affecting my rank. The community seems to be really split on the necessity of disavowing links like these. Because of these links, according to Ahrefs, my backlink profile is 38% anchor text of "." .

Everything else checks out in my own review as well as Moz tools and Ahrefs with very high quality scores etc. Webmasters is fine, indexing is fine, pagespeed insights is in the 90's, ssl is A+.

I've never had to deal with what seems to be an attack of this size.

Thanks.

[plahpoy]

Hi Nikki Thanks for the response.

I too am under the impression that with penguin being live that big G had figured out how to diminish value from spam links and it was no longer an issue. On the flip side The only real thing that's changed over the past 6 months for us is a massive increase in these spam links.

I will try to just bullet out a response so I don't write a novel

• Yes I have checked if it's hacked and it is not.
• I have no manual actions listed
• I did just look for weird traffic sources, and out of the 48 that I do have, the only weird ones are from urls with the spammy links.
• Also to note, our ranking has not dropped in any other search engines, only google. In fact we have improved in Bing and Yahoo.
• Another note. I have disavowed a few porn backlinks we have gotten from sites like gay.interracialsexcinema among others.
• In the past 7 days I have gotten 33 new links from sites like zenlaser.c0oo - thefreestates.commm prowp.neeet  and lilucia02.coooommmm slash cantilever-coffee-table dot html.
• Many of the domains that are linking to us are literally created (whois lookup)  15 - 30 days before we get a link. All domains are registered private (except one that i caught just before going private and it was in china) and 90% of them are hiding behind cloudflare.
• An annoying thing is that over 90% of these links are on pages that the url path is the actual same url path or title tag that we are using on our page as well as the h1's and h2's with a "." anchor or the actual path anchor linking back to either our page or an image on our site.

I updated the disavow a few weeks ago but have not added all domains to it as I wanted to knock it down little by little. I have been hesitant to do a one shot one kill approach as I want to be cautious in the event that I make a mistake and cause an even larger issue.

Any further thoughts?

Thanks again!

[nhhernandez]

Hello there, according to this article by Rand - https://moz.com/blog/what-if-my-competitors-point-spammy-links-to-my-site Google is pretty good at determining spammy links and if you have such pointing to your site, they should be able to discount these links. However, your site is clearly being affected by this as shown by your rankings drop.

Have you checked that your site isn't hacked? http://www.isithacked.com/

Have you checked that you don't have any manual actions on your search console?

Have you checked whether you have some traffic coming from weird locations? I ask because there was a time when a site we're working on published a harmless blog on children and the use of snapchat and there was a spike of visitors searching for explicit materials landing on that page. As a result, we suddenly had a ton of backlinks with explicit anchors that go to that page. Their rankings went down. The page was deleted though and all went back to normal.

This article might also help you: https://moz.com/blog/preparing-for-negative-seo

The author, however, said that for an attack with the same scale as yours, it is a good idea to audit your links regularly and submit a disavow file. Hope this helps.