Should I worry that thousands of spam sites are linking to me?

[steve_benjamins]

I was browsing Google Webmaster Tools and discovered there are 117,301 links to my site— mostly from very low-quality, spammy websites. I definitely did not solicit these links. I'm worried they are from a competitor trying to get me penalized by Google.

Should I be worried about this?

spam-websites.png?1505218483

[Joe_Stoffel]

Hi Steven,

This does sound like it could be a negative SEO campaign, are you seeing spammy anchor text with these links?

Google is effective at eliminating any negative impact caused by such campaigns but they are not always perfect. Are you seeing evidence that this is effectively harming your SEO? If you believe it is being effective, Google suggest you report it in the webmaster forums or by contacting John Mueller (https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts) and they will look into the situation. Check out this Moz blog post 'preparing for negative SEO' for more information and tips for how to address this situation.

As a precaution, I recommend submitting these spammy links to Google's disavow tool.

[steve_benjamins]

Thank you Joe. This is insanely helpful.

I have not seen any dramatic drops in ranking but this has me concerned.

I've also noticed that recently very spammy Tweets referencing my site (sitebuilderreport.com) have been published: https://twitter.com/search?q=sitebuilderreport

Also troubling is that a number of the linking sites have porn-related domain names. That seems inherently spammy.

I'm having trouble tracking down the actual links using GWT to check the anchor text. So I'll get back on that.

[Joe_Stoffel]

You are welcome!

I suggest trying the anchor text report in Open Site Explorer - this should help you group spam links by anchor text.

https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/

[steve_benjamins]

Oh that's a good idea. I just tried it (link) and it actually doesn't seem so bad