New un-natural links to my website that i didnt create.. and lots of them!

[Pixelstorm]

Hi There

In the last few months my search organic traffic has gone down and i am looking into links to my website through webmaster tools.

It looks like there is some sort of automated robot that is building new links to my website at a rate of 5 per week!  All are spammy, directory links.  It looks like this has been going  on for a few months now.

I  have no idea how to find and stop this.  But i have a feeling this might explain why my traffic is down.

ALSO non of these links are in MOZ Open site explorer or Majestic SEO.. they are just showing as just discovered in webmaster tools.  I am assuming that means its pretty accurate ?!

ALL help is appreciated! Thanks!

Paula

[KevinBudzynski]

Have you ever hired an SEO company that may be responsible? If these links appear spammy, request to the site's webmaster to remove, document and disavow asap.

Also, why do you believe it's an automated robot? Is the post the same?

[LesleyPaone]

My first course of action would be to start using the Google link disavow tool, then I would try to make contact with the website(s) and ask them to stop.

[WilliamKammer]

A disavow report is a must. Also make sure there's no manual action message in Webmasters that may require a reconsideration request.

Definitely contact all the webmasters to request removal and document the requests, they will be useful for the reconsideration if needed.

If it was a bot, it seems like there would be a lot more than 5 links a week. A number that low looks more like someone manually adding things, which could be a sign of negative SEO tactics by a competitor (if it's not an SEO company you hired that is just bad at their job).

[JaneCopland]

Hi,

The guys here have already left some great comments. It's hard to guess why / where the links are coming from without seeing them, but I agree with William that five per week seems low for an automated bot. Those things usually do thousands, unless it's being run by someone who doesn't want you to notice the activity. Either way, a person is probably behind the activity at its root - do you have any idea who might want to maliciously hurt your website?

There is a possibility that the activity is not being carried out in order to directly hurt you, but that your site is part of someone's larger negative SEO attack against someone else. Some negative SEO attacks will target a business (let's say Nordstrom's, for purpose of example). They'll point thousands of links to http://shop.nordstrom.com/ from some terrible pages, but will sometimes mix in links to other sites to muddy the waters a bit. Are there any other sites linked to from the same pages as yours? Any trends you can spot?

Moz and OSE sometimes miss the real underbelly of the internet - the stuff that's available if you know where to look for it (and Google usually knows where to look for it) but for the purposes of regular marketing / SEO, is fairly irrelevant. My former agency built its own backlink analysis tool and did the same thing. We could do deep crawls to find this crap if we needed to (and so can Moz) but it's thankfully rare that situations like this come along that require such a deep look at links. Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs, etc. will show you links from the part of the internet that they believe counts. Frustrating when things like this happen, but if you are finding these in WMT then you should have sufficient information to go through with a disavowal and / or reconsideration request.