Uncontrollable Spammy Backlinks - Disavow or Not?

[evan89]

Hey Mozzers,

I have ran a few different backlink reports, and I noticed that one of my sites has an incredible amount of spammy backlinks. These were not done by a prior SEO, they are simmply spammy links that were scraped and inserted on terrible sites, forums, directories, etc. 100% uncontrollable. The anchor text includes anything from the domain to "live sex" and "victoria's secret coupons". There are probably close to 700 or so of these backlinks from around 150-200 domains.

I have read that one should contact the webmaster, and use disavow as a last resort, but I am not sure if that advice is for spammy link building techniques, which we have no history of doing.

Is this normal? What is the best way to handle this? Is it likely that these are affecting this site's ranking at the moment? The number of spammy links drastically affects the ratio of quality backlinks to spammy backlinks.

This is so frustrating...

[Travis_Bailey]

Hi Evan,

I would probably disavow the domains. Though it's pretty hard to thoroughly answer without a reference to any domain.

To the question of normal, I would say it isn't terribly uncommon. I've seen scenarios like this enough over the years.

I'm unsure whether or not this is adversely affecting your site. I don't have a site to reference. Though if you would like to private message 'the deets', I can take a closer look. If you would like to post it publicly, so all the other kids can play, that's fine too.

[evan89]

Hey Travis,

I was doing some research, and I saw that it is generally advised not to use disavow unless the site has been penalized. This isn't the case - in fact it is doing quite well. I just want to keep the link profile clean, and I am wondering if something so uncontrollable is something to worry about...

[EGOL]

Is this normal?

Lots of people run scrapers and use the data to make phony directories and mash-up pages.  They mostly have keyword links to websites and bits of content (kinda like Google

My sites all have lots of these links.  I am not doing anything about them.  I think Google understands how these sites are made.  

[evan89]

Yeah, there seems to be a lot of those. I am finding a lot from sites with other languages as well.

My concern is that the number of these scraped and spammy links is getting close to the number of good links. Granted the good links have a much higher DA and trust flow. I am mostly concerned about what the link profile looks like to search engines, or do they just understand these situations and ignore them?

Thanks EGOL!

[EGOL]

My concern is that the number of these scraped and spammy links is getting close to the number of good links.

I agree.  Some of my content is related to commodities and investments and those pages can be linked to from thousands of these crap sites.

In my opinion, most webmasters are not looking at their backlinks and if Google started slapping people down for these types of links there would be very few sites left standing.

So, I am not worrying about them.

[evan89]

Hey EGOL,

I really appreciate your feedback. Thanks you so much!

I would also like to here others weigh in on this question too...

[SharewarePros]

Dear Evan,

You could get a Google manual-penalty, or simply be affected by an algorithm penalty (Penguin), so the best practice is:

1. Contact the webmaster of these sites and ask for link removal.

2. The remaining links should be included on the DISAVOW file at domain level.

You should be use to construct your link profile several sources, such as Google WMT, Bing WMT, Yandex WMT and of cours several tools such as ahref, SeoMoz, LinkMajestic and LinkDetrox, and other tools, each bad link you detect and get remove from there is a goal and prevent future penalties or gradual downgrades of your rank.

Good luck

[evan89]

Hey Claudio,

I looked into this, and I have posted this question on a few different forums. The challenge is that I am receiving so many different perspectives.

I am told by some that I should not disavow. They say not to draw attention to an issue, especially if these links are not related to my industry.

Some say "well, if you get penalized, you won't rank for victoria secret coupons, so... so what". Others like EGOL say that Google is smart, and will recognize these as spammy links, and can just be ignored.

I am curious if anyone has experience with disavowing spammy links, and what their results are. It seems like the SEO community is not entirely sure how to handle this issue... nor am I.

I welcome any further comments or suggestions.

Thanks!

[SharewarePros]

I was dealing with DISAVOW for a long time and my conclusions are:

1. Remove as many links as you can.

2. The remaining links (bad or suspicious) should be included into a DISAVOW file and upload it to Google Disavow tool.

This allow your site to keep safe for future and coming penalties or rank issues.

PS.: Google can detect all the un-natural link schemes better than you and me ....

Hope it helps

[Travis_Bailey]

You'll probably be okay, it appears most of it is ebbing. Though I would definitely look at your folder level traffic. Penalties can happen on the folder and page level as well. It's not so bad as to merit a domain level penalty.

I would be more concerned if the anchor text targeted something you do want.

In regard to disavows, disavow early and as often as necessary.

[evan89]

Hey Claudio,

I don't mean to be difficult here, I just need to be diligent.

I thought the disavow tool was more of a "i messed up, so now I will fix it" kind of a tool. We have not done any unnatural link building or directory submissions. I don't want to indicate to Google that I messed up if... well... I didn't do anything wrong... does that make sense?

I really do appreciate your answers and time with this.

Evan

[SharewarePros]

My friend Evan,

Google get thousand of innocent reconsideration request, saying "I'm innocent" for example if you tag any page with the robots meta tag "OINDEX,FOLLOW"  it always will consider it as NOINDEX,FOLLOW they assume the pesimistic option, so if you has spammy links, you has two options, the first is remove all of them which will save your site or leave it and be penalized or rank low .....

Again my experience is assume that Google will think you're the responsible (the pesimistic option) and try to remove all the possible links and the rest should be disavowed and never try to joke the links to your site, think Google has the 90% of the market on the internet, so your site and mime are not the most important.

Recently Google has penalized to ebay and many others ....

Hope it helps

[vivekrathore]

Disavow the whole domains !

[SharewarePros]

YES absolutelly, (Always at domain level) it prevents future new pages from the spammy domain linking your pages, only you can use subdomain level where the links comes from authority domains, for example blogs on blogspot ie: linking.blogspot.com in this case you should include on your disavow file only the subdomain linking.blogspot.com and at the TLD level ".com" which includes all the regional like .com.tw , .com.ar etc

Use to detect bad links as many tools as you can starting with Google WMT, bING WMT, yandex WMT, SeoMOZ, ahref, linkdetrox etc.

Hope it helps

[MarieHaynes]

Google employee John Mueller has been asked about this type of thing several times in Webmaster Central hangouts.  Here is an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEAQyHtRQxg&feature=share&t=23m30s (23:30).  His answer is always to say that Google is usually pretty good at ignoring these links but that it's not a bad idea to disavow just in case.

You do not need to contact site owners and try to get these links removed.  I mean, if you really wanted to try, you could, but you're likely to spend a huge amount of time doing this with very little reward.  You will not get a manual penalty for having links like this.  Manual penalties are given to people who cheat, not those who have been hacked.  (The exception would be if you have malware on the site...but then that's a different warning and link cleanup is not a part of recovery.)

Most likely these links will not affect you in the Penguin algorithm, but because there's so much we don't know about Penguin, it's not a bad idea to disavow these.  A quick way to do this is to gather your links on either ahrefs if you have a membership or majestic (it's free if you verify your site) and sort them by anchor text.  (You can use OSE, but OSE tends to ignore these super spammy links so it's not the best choice for this type of analysis.)  Filter them so that you only see the spammy links.  Then, disavow those links on the domain level.

[evan89]

Thanks for your response Marie,

That is very helpful!