I'm seeing thousands of no-follow links on spam sites. Can you help figure it out?

[TicketCity]

I noticed that we are receiving thousands of links from many different sites that are obviously disguised as something else. The strange part is that some of them are legitimate sites when you go to the root. I would say 99% of the page titles read something like : 1 Hour Loan Approval No Credit Check Vermont, go cash advance - africanamericanadaa.com.

Can someone please help me?

Here are some of the URL's we are looking at:

http://africanamericanadaa.com/genialt/100-dollar-loans-for-people-with-no-credit-colorado.html

http://muratmakara.com/sickn/index.php?recipe-for-cone-06-crackle-glaze

http://semtechblog.com/tacoa/index.php?chilis-blue-raspberry-margarita

http://wesleygcook.com/rearc/guaranteed-personal-loans-oregon.html

[EGOL]

These types of links can be a result of two things.....

A) Programmers creating spam pages, stuffing them with links, and sometimes injecting the pages into unsuspecting websites.  (If it looks like these links were injected into unsuspecting legitimate sites then I would email them a link to one of these pages so they can delete the pages and get their vulnerabilities fixed.)

B)  Low quality SEOs who were hired to linkbuild to your website.   Do you have any SEOs working for you?    Do you have any weasel competitors who might be trying to tank your site?

I see lots of links from A) pointing at my sites.  They are generally harmless.  You can disavow the entire domain if you don't like the links.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Here's what I would do. Conduct a backlink audit...

• Get a list of all your backlinks

• Majestic

• Moz Open Site Explorer

• Google Webmaster Tools

• Assess your backlinks

• What ones are obviously spam?

• What are your good backlinks?

• Do any of those good backlinks link to your old spam pages?

• You can use LinkRisk to assess your profile

• Reach out to websites with links you want to keep

• Have them correct the URL to a new relevant page

• Try removing links that are from spam sites

• Reach out and ask for the link to be removed

• Do NOT pay to have links removed

• Keep a spreadsheet of sites/pages you reached out to and those that removed links?

• Here's a good resource from Moz.

• Disavow backlinks that are obviously spam and could potentially penalize you

If you have trouble identifying bad links, ask yourself the following...

• Does this link help my website?

• Does it send quality traffic?

• Is this link relevant to my website?

• Would I trust this site (that's linking to me) if I landed on it?

• Is the website or content in which I am being linked from topically relevant to my website?

• If you check metrics - does anything about the metrics (domain authority, page authority,Majestic, SEMRush traffic/ranking data, etc) make me feel uneasy?

• Are the links from directory templates? (example)

• Inspect URLs with blatant spam words

• Free

• Porn

• XXX

• Submit

• Directory

• Paid

• Links

• URL

• Sex

• etc.

• Check for multiple domains and URLs on the same IPs

• This can usually show link farms or spam

• Don't be quick to discount nofollow links - nofollow's do provide value, so as long as they pass your sniff test, don't remove them simply because of this tag

If you have issues doing any of the above, look at Moz's Recommended List as there are a ton of qualified professionals that can assist.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[TicketCity]

Thanks for all the detail. I'll definitely get started on the process.

[TicketCity]

If this is a competitor doing this. How could we figure out who it is?