I would like to get rid of 300,000+ links, please

[Linda-Vassily]

A couple of months ago, I noticed that in Webmaster Tools my site had acquired 300,000+ links from a single site, updown.com. It seems to be a reputable site, and also in the correct industry, so I wrote to them and said that we love links, but that was probably a few too many and they all go to our privacy policy page. I suggested that they had some type of error that they might want to fix.

After a month with no response, I wrote again, and still no response. This is now a month after that.
The strange thing is that I don't see the links when I visit their pages, even in the source (Google provides a list of sample linking pages). I also don't see those links in Open Site Explorer, Majestic, AHREFs, nor Screaming Frog.

If I were seeing this anywhere else, I'd just ignore it as some type of glitch. But this is information from Google. I have not received any warnings nor manual actions and I am disinclined to open a disavow can of worms, since the site is doing well and I'd rather not stir things up if I don't have to.

Any thoughts about what I should (or shouldn't) do? Is this a problem, or should I assume Google knows it is a glitch and will ignore it? It has been in my Webmaster Tools for about three months.

Thanks for reading!

[DirkC]

Hi

In my experience there is a certain latency with the links shown in Webmastertools, I has the tendency to continue to show links, even after they have been removed (we used to have a partnership with a large telco - and had 1.5mio links coming from them - when the partnership ended it took several months before they disappeard in WMT). If you are unable to find these links using the tools you mentioned I wouldn't worry about them.

rgds,

Dirk

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Linda,

In the absence of any penalty or rankings dip, there's likely nothing to worry about as this is pretty common. If nothing else, even though Google reports those links in GWT it's very possible they discount them in every other way that counts.

On the other hand, if you are worried about it there should be no harm in proactively disavowing the domain. Lot's of agency folk that I know make this a regular practice to disavow any suspect links and 99.9% of the time, if done correctly, no harm will come to your site simply by filing a disavow file (unless you disavow links that are actually good, but that's another story)