Spam and Irrelavent Backlinks

[wearehappymedia]

Hey!

We have a site that is fairly well ranking in a niche of the medical profession.

It has a good link profile with great .gov links etc.

OSE doesn't show most of the links, however all the ones it does show are all good.

We noticed an across the board drop in rankings recently, and checked on AHREFS.

What we found, was hundreds of backlinks to a variety of pages on the site from a wide range of spam/porn/Russian/irrelevant sites.

Even stranger is that some of the links have anchor text like "continue shopping" but they link to a page on our site about a type of limb fracture.

Has anyone come across this before? How is this possible?

Thanks

[webtheoria.com]

I remember in the past, competitors used to do this to harm the SEO of others.

they may have purchased these links with just few dollars..

[LSIversen]

It sounds like a negative SEO attack from someone else. If the links are already hurting your position, I don't know, but I'd hurry and get a disavow file sent in to Google.

I know the guidelines say to contact sites to get them to remove the links, but with these spam links that's just not gonna happen. So just go through your linkprofile (preferably using several tools) and disavow those domains that are irrelevant.

[wearehappymedia]

So that sort of thing is actually going on?

[RuthBurrReedy]

This kind of thing definitely happens. It is often the result of a link injection malware that finds vulnerabilities in websites and then posts hundreds of links on them. Usually, link spam will not affect your rankings, but it can. Fortunately, Google provides a tool to help you tell Google that you weren't the one who built those links. Moz has a guide to using it here: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-googles-disavow-tool.

It can take a while for links to get disavowed, so in the meantime, do whatever you can to build high-quality, relevant links to your site and make sure your site is optimized for search as best you can.