Thousands of links - Am I being sabatoged?!

[Veebs]

It seems that I am being sabatoged. I have been disavowing links every month because there seems to be more and more spam links that are popping up on my site and I'm not doing ANYTHING to allow that to happen. Does anyone have any insight?

A. do you think I am being sabatoged?

B. Is there a way to find out who is doing it?!

[LauraSultan]

Are the backlinks pointing to actual pages on your website? I have seen cases where there was malware on a site that created new pages the site owner couldn't see. Then hundreds of backlinks were created that point to the malware pages. You may want to scan your site for malware.

[Veebs]

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[LauraSultan]

When you say "there seems to be more and more spam links that are popping up on my site," do you mean the links are actually on your site? Like blog comments?

You can scan your site at https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/.  There are others as well, but it's a good idea to have a web developer actually look at the files on your server as well. Scanners don't always see everything. If your site is a WordPress site, you can install and scan for malware using the Wordfence plugin. (Note: Some hosts, like WP Engine, don't allow the Wordfence plugin.)

If you don't want to share your domain name publicly, you can send it to me in a private message and I'll take a look.

[MattRoney]

Hi Veebs! Did Laura answer your question? If so, please mark one or both of her responses as a "Good Answer." Otherwise, we'd love to get an update on this! Have you learned anything more?

[Veebs]

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[Veebs]

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[LauraSultan]

Yes, please share the URL.

[Veebs]

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[LauraSultan]

It's possible that you are being sabotaged. I've only looked at backlinks in Open Site Explorer, but I noticed a trend. Most of the questionable links appear to be pingbacks on the other websites.

Someone else may have insight as to why this is happening. It looks like pingback spam on the other websites. The question is why your site is part of that spam. I don't know how you would find out who's doing it.

Fortunately, they appear to be nofollow links, so they won't have a negative effect on your site. You may simply have to remain vigilant with your backlink analyses.

[Veebs]

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[LauraSultan]

Most likely not. The links may have been created by a 3rd-party bot, a Fiverr project, or something similar that can't be easily traced. The only thing left to do is ask yourself who benefits from the negative SEO attack. Even so, that's likely a large pool of search competitors.