Art website is being spammed for NFL Jerseys - should I disavow?

[Joe.Robison]

I have no idea why or what their mistake/intent would be, but my mom's artist website (kathleenmrobison.com) has been link/anchor text spammed for NFL jerseys - so weird.

As seen in SEMrush, her site is actually ranking for some of these keywords - but we don't want/need these at all.

Do we proactively disavow all of these sites in with the disavow file, or just ignore until we get problems with warnings?

**Edit: **I also see that some fake URLs have been created, so it is definitely a spam/hacked issue.

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[RyanPurkey]

Hi Joe. Marie Haynes wrote a nice article on this a couple of months ago (http://moz.com/blog/preparing-for-negative-seo), and example #6 seems to be most applicable:

This was not a competitor trying to hurt my rankings. In fact, the tens of thousands of spammy links that were pointing at my site were actually helping my rankings at that point. What had happened here is that someone had taken advantage of a vulnerability in a Wordpress plugin that had not been updated. They were able to hack into the site and create a whole bunch of new pages. They then pointed huge numbers of spammy links at these pages and redirected them to their Michael Kors affiliate sites.

In this situation, we removed the offending pages, found and fixed the access point, AND I also disavowed all of those links. According to Google, if you get hacked and have bad links pointing to you, you can probably ignore them because their algorithms are good at picking up and just discounting this sort of thing. However, it concerned me that these bad links actually were helping this site. If Google was just discounting them then they should have had no effect. I am 99% sure that I would have been ok to leave them, especially since the pages they pointed to had been removed (which also removes the link pointing to that page), but just to be absolutely sure that something odd didn't affect me with the next Penguin update, I disavowed them all at the domain level.

The whole article is pretty good, so take a look. Best of luck getting it all squared away.

[Joe.Robison]

Great response Ryan, thanks! Plugins updated, disavow and closing backdoor is next!