Spammy Inbound Links

[niallfred]

Hello,

We have been using Zendesk to manage our customer support tickets for approx 2 years. We recently noticed that the attached forum had lot's of spam comments attached to it. Promoting Viagra and the like.

The system was installed as a subdomain of my site support.mysite.com

We have since deleted our account with Zendesk but Moz and Google are reporting loads of inbound links to that subdomain that are all total spam with Viagra in the anchor text etc.

The subdomain no longer exists and now throws a 404. Can these links still hurt me? Is there other steps I need to take? I have disavowed all the links.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I would recommend checking your internal links and sitemap to make sure there are no links pointed to the subdomain. These can be quickly found doing a ScreamingFrog crawl.

From there, I would conduct a quick backlink audit to see if there are any backlinks you may have that are pointed to the subdomain that can be removed or at the very least, disavowed. You may also find good, quality, and relevant links that you want to keep - feel free to reach out and update those to point to the domain, or whatever URL is relevant on your main site.

If the subdomain is in fact done, over, and gone, you have the opportunity to noindex it, block it with robots.txt, and you can ask that Google removes it from their index as well. You can also look into a 410 status code, which tells crawlers this page is never coming back, ever. You'll need to discuss all of these options with your team of course and weigh the options!

Hope this helps! Good luck!