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://cloudz.click/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
-
Should I disavow these links?
Hi all, I have a ski website that I am currently performing a toxic backlink audit on. I have noted that a lot of the links being flagged as toxic/spammy by the tool I am using seem to be the same/similar sites with different URLs. The sites are vaguely related to skiing (relating to helicopter travel options for travelling to ski resorts) but it is concerning me that there are so many of them and they are being flagged as so toxic.
Link Building | | SolveWebMedia
Do you think it is worth disavowing these? Or contacting the owner to ask them to remove the link? I have included an example of some of the links below. https://www.cannes-helicopters.co.uk/index.php?menuopen=21&showcontent=5
https://nice-helicopter.co.uk/index.php?menuopen=21&showcontent=5
https://monaco-helicopter.co.uk/index.php?menuopen=21&showcontent=5 Slightly different site but same favicon icon:
https://monaco-helicopter.co.uk/index.php?menuopen=21&showcontent=5
https://www.whitetracks-holidays.com/Helicopter_Transfers_Villars_Switzerland.htm Thanks in advance for any advice / help!0 -
Back link from site with DA of 72 to a website domain. Clicking on the link redirects to our website not the attended one.
Hi,
Link Building | | JIMBO16
I've ran a back link check and discovered a good back link to a site which then gets redirected back to my company's website. I have a feeling that an old SEO agency has purchased a small website which has a decent link back from a relevant organisation with a high Domain authority and then redirects the domain to our website to get the link juice. What are your thought on this? Is this really bad practise and possibly damaging? Thanks, Jim0 -
What is a good ratio of total links to linking root domains?
Is 100 total links for every linking domain too high? I suppose I could also look at ratios of sites that are doing well in the rankings.
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
Footer Links And Link Juice
I'm starting to learn about link juice and notice in GWMT > Traffic > Internal Links, that the list is in this order by the links counted on each page. Some are in the footer and some are in the header, with some being more important than others commercially i.e. /register /privacy /terms /search /sitemap /disclaimer /blog /register So I am wondering if I should add a 'no-follow' attribute to the footer links i.e. privacy, terms, disclaimer and leave the others as they are? Does this help retain link juice on each page where the links appear? Or am I missing the point all together? This is my website: http://goo.gl/CN0e5
Link Building | | Ubique0 -
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 -
Link Detox and Link Removal
I have a question about which links to remove after running a link detox from Link Research Tools. First a little back story. I had had an SEO company link building for one of the websites I own. But I have recently stopped working with them. In the last month my rankings have near dropped off the charts. I have just recently gotten access to Google webmaster tools and noticed an unnatural link warning from back in March. So yesterday I ran link detox and it reported 19 toxic links, 120 suspicious links, and 24 healthy links. It's rather obvious that I should remove all of the toxic links. They all from sites that have been deindexed by google. But my question is a about the suspicious links. What should my criteria be for removing them? Am I better off removing them all and leaving my site with only 24 healthy links or should I personally comb through them and remove only the worst of the worst so that I leave my site with a few more links? I'd really like to get the site ready to resubmit to google as soon as I can. Thoughts? yyCOf.png
Link Building | | CobraJones950 -
Back link pyramid
Excuse me for such a newbie question but is using a backlinking pyramid black hat seo. I was trying to find out but every site gives you different advice on this subject. Also If there is a type of backlinking structure that is best please let me know. thanks
Link Building | | JasonRae0 -
Link Frequency
I understand that good link building is all about the quality of the link / the anchor text attached to it. But, what about frequency? Should I build until I can't build anymore? or create a plan to submit links to a certain # of sites per week/month?
Link Building | | pricefutures0