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.
Sudden spike in backlinks - should we disavow?
-
A kitchen remodelling firm in Australia has noticed a big increase in spammy backlinks to their website since April this year. Majestic shows that referring domains and backlinks during that period have gone up from 400 domains (10,000 links) to 1,070 domains (47,000+ links). About 100 are sitewide links.
The vast majority are "follow" links directed at image files on the site - ending in .jpg. Ahrefs now shows the number one anchor text (23%) is a period (full stop) "." Most of the links come from .us domains, eg:
cowboysr.us
blackphoto.us
alldpic.comGoogle Search Console isn't showing any of these links, there's no penalty on the site and there's been no noticeable change in rankings (if anything organic clicks went up over May, June, July) ... so we're wondering what action - if any - should be taken.
Are these links likely to have a negative impact on the site and homepage? Should we disavow these links?
Appreciate any advice. Thanks.
-
Thanks Igor - none of these sites look legit. All have low to non-existent metrics like trust flow. We'll go through the list and disavow.
Any thoughts on what the purpose of these scraped image links are - is this a form of negative SEO?
-
Even if flow metrics on those links are good, the sudden spike is already a red flag for search engines.
If those links aren't organic get rid of them.
I'd get a list of referring domains and bulk check the domain metrics (age, pr, trust flow and etc) and if there's nothing good - get rid of them.
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
-
Backlinks on Moz not on Google Search Console
Moz is showing thousands of backlinks to my site that are not showing up on Google Search Console - which is good because those links were created by some spammer in Pakistan somewhere. I haven't yet submitted a disavow report to Google of well over 10K links because the list keeps growing every day with new backlinks that have been rerouted to a 404 page. I have asked Google to clarify and they put my question on their forum for an answer, which I'm still waiting for - so I thought I'd try my luck here. My question... If Moz does not match Google Search Console, and backlinks are important to results, how valid is the ranking that Moz creates to let me know how I'm doing in this competition and if I'm improving or not. If the goal is to get Google to pay attention and I use Moz to help me figure out how to do this, how can I do that if the backlink information isn't the same - by literally over 10 000 backlinks created by some spammer doing odd things... They've included the url from their deleted profile on my site with 100s of other urls, including Moz.com and are posting them everywhere with their preferred anchor text. Moz ranking considers the thousands of spam backlinks I can't get rid of and Google ignores them or disavows them. So isn't the rankings, data, and graphs apples and bananas? How can I know what my site's strength really is and if I'm improving or not if the data doesn't match? Complete SEO Novice Shannon Peel
Link Building | | MarketAPeel
Brand Storyteller
MarketAPeel0 -
Sudden drop in external links... why?
We had a lot of external links (2.5K, which was good compared to our competition), but in the last few weeks, it dropped 1.1K. I obviously did something wrong. What are the causes of such a dramatic drop like that? Questions, suggestions, ideas, anything is welcome at this point. Thanks!
Link Building | | brandon_lee0 -
Sudden drop in trust flow
Hi there, we've noticed a sudden drop in both trust and citation flow scores for many of our clients' websites. We haven't done any black hat activities nor done anything differently the last few months that we can think have contributed to this. We have however noticed a backlink from a website: http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/archives.html that has appeared across all the websites which have dropped in rankings. Could this link be the contributing factor & would that mean someone has linked it to our clients' websites?
Link Building | | Alexanders0 -
Best Backlink checker - OSE or Hrefs?
Hi Guys I am looking for a new back link tool but i'm not sure which one to go for. Should I continue using Open Site Explorer or should I go for something else like Ahrefs.com or something else?
Link Building | | AndersDK0 -
Ways to remove spammy backlinks
Hello everyone, I got hit with an algorithm penalty and need to start removing old backlinks ASAP. Does anyone have any good resources on how best to ask webmasters for removal? Are there any other ways to remove bad back links besides the disavow tool? (An SEO consultant I talked to said that they had a proprietary software that can remove them - is that possible?) Thanks all,
Link Building | | CleanEdisonInc1 -
How important is the originating country of backlinks?
How important is it that you gain backlinks from websites in the same country you're targeting? Scenario: You have a website targeting users in Japan. How important is it that backlinks to your website are from Japanese websites? Do you need a majority of links from Japanese websites to rank well, or will you do OK with 25% Japanese links and 75% links from other countries? According to Majestic, sites for popular Japanese brands like tsutaya.co.jp and seiyu.co.jp get more links from US sites than from Japanese sites.
Link Building | | AdamThompson0 -
What is the best way to go about building backlinks?
I'm a newbie here and my head is spinning because I don't know where or how to start the backlink building process. My website is 1 month old and I don't have any backlinks yet. what is the best way to go about it? Should I study my competition's backlinks and go from there? I'm so confused I need help! Please help! Any information will be greatly appreciated!!
Link Building | | allie741