Lot of new suspicious external links

[tjr]

I am running a small-language site and suddenly saw a lot of incoming English links in Moz Reports and Opensiteexplorer from various domains (the sites are in English, but anchor words are not). When I check the page sources of there is no link to the site (as there shouldn't).

Any idea what is happening and what to do about it?

Thanks for help in advance!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I've seen this a couple of times as well, in my case mostly the Web sites were totally focused on making money and by accident they dropped a link there to our sites. Mostly such links will be gone within a couple of days/ weeks. If you really want Google not to see these links you could use the disavow tool to make sure Google ignores these links.

[tjr]

Thanks for quick reply Martijn. For some reason I get the feeling that somebody is trying to make the site appear blackhat (though it is not)...

[GeoffKenyon]

I've seen a lot of spammy links pop up for some of my smaller sites and they have usually been scrapers. When these would show up in OSE, the links wouldn't be on the page anymore. While I wouldn't initially be too concerned, here's a few follow up questions for you:

• How many of these shady links are you seeing in OSE?
• Do they have optimized anchor text?
• How many links/root domains are in your backlink profile?
• Are you seeing these links reported in Google webmaster tools?

If these links aren't making up much of your backlink profile and they aren't optimized, I wouldn't be concerned. If you have a small link profile and these links make up a good portion of your profile, or they are highly optimized, they might be something to watch for.

If you're really nervous, you could just use the disavow tool now.