Website Spam Backlinks Solution

[Ubique]

I have been doing some back-link checking and found that 25% of the total back-links to my PR5 site are Spam and generated over the past 8 weeks.

There are 189 links in total from 38 different domains and the anchor text is a combination of 'ugg boots for women' from TLDs in China, Russia and North Korea. The PR of these sites is 15 are n/a, 12 are 0 and the other 11 range between 1 - 6.

More interestingly, all the links point to 1 single page on the domain. I have taken down that page now and wondering if I should 'disavow' the offending links in Google and Bing?

Clearly with such a high % of my total links now being Spam, I want to be proactive so this does not hurt my rankings in search. If a Spambot is behind it then the issue is going to get worse moving forward. Any advice is welcome...

[MikeRoberts]

Have the links actually harmed your site in any way? If the sites are extremely spammy, full of spun content, and/or feature only scraped content then you may not want them pointing to you... but if they haven't hurt your traffic, rankings, etc. then why remove your page or disavow the link? Google will likely just discount the links instead of pegging you with an algorithmic penalty. In the mean time, why not work on acquiring some relevant backlinks through outreach.

[Backlinko]

You definitely want to be proactive...but not overreactive.

The disavow tool should only be used for a penalized site.

If you have a clean link profile you probably don't have to worry.

I once had a competitor hit me with 250,000 spammy blog comments...and nothing happened.

If you're really concerned you can always 404 the page and repost the content on another URL.

[irvingw]

You said:  "More interestingly, all the links point to 1 single page on the domain. I have taken down that page now and wondering if I should 'disavow' the offending links in Google and Bing?"

You're in luck!

404 the page and your job is done. Just change the URL by one character and you're good.Make sure the page is actually retuning a 404 status code.

Google only cares about links to pages that resolve on your site. By 404'ing them you are essentially removing all of the links in one shot.

Don't make a disavow, or anything you're done.

[Backlinko]

Just one thing about that you need to be careful about: having your 404 page indexed.

Some 404 pages have content (ie. "Sorry, but this page has moved...").

And if it's the only page on your site with that content, Google may still index the page.

[Ubique]

Ah right, my 404 page does have text on it like you say.

If I remove the original page URL from Google's Index by using WMT, would that resolve the issue moving forward?

[Ubique]

A pragmatic solution which is great.

I was worried about how Google would interpret my doing this. Panda, penguin... it all seems so up in the air and I don't want to fall foul. Essentially these links are pointing at gibberish now, so no foul I reckon!!

Thx.

[Backlinko]

Text on the page doesn't necessarily mean it'll get indexed...but it might.

You can always just 404 the page, wait a week or so, and see if the page shows up in Google's index (just copy and paste the URL into Google).

If it shows up you can simple block SE spiders from indexing it using your htaccess and/or GWT.