My site backlinking search came back with 19k results, that's WAY above the usual number

[dynastymedia]

Looking into the results I found over 18,000 instances of the same 2 websites having links in every single page, staging version of their site.

How do I get rid of these? Are they damaging my SEO?

[Dalerio-Consulting]

As there are 19K new links to your site that appeared out of nowhere, most certainly they are spam links, that could be done by a competitor as a form of negative SEO. It can be very harmful to your site and lower your rankings or ever de-index you from google and bing.

What you should do is disavow the backlinks. In order to remove the spam links, you need to check all the backlinks one by one. Moz Spam Score is a very useful tool to filter some of the links, but mainly it's manual work and you need to be very careful not to disavow the positive links that your site already has. You can read more about it at my answer here: Advise Help on Bad Link Removals

If you need any help with the disavow process, feel free to let us know.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com

[dynastymedia]

Hi Daniel,

Very helpful answer thank you - I had a good look through and was able to spot the obviously spammy ones and will be submitting them to Google Search disavow. However, that probably only makes up 200-300 of the 19K+ inbound links.

I think I can identify the main cause for the huge amount of links are from the same two domains.  Quite literally, from rows 200 - 18,000 these two websites show up in various different ways, e.g. Staging sites etc. These are actually sites we work closely with.  think it's an overlooked issue on their part.

I'm guessing I can't fix that from my end. Is it worth notifying them that there seems to be an issue with their website?

Also on a linked note - one of the sites for example, has the URL as an image link on EVERY page, now I feel as though that is a poor design choice on their part, or they are not using nofollow. Am I right in thinking I need to inform their webmaster that their links are creating negative SEO?

In some cases I followed the link from the data export sheet to the linking page, but couldn't find a link to our site anywhere. What might be the cause of that?

[Dalerio-Consulting]

I'm glad I helped.

As these are sites you closely work with, you can notify them regarding the issue and their webmaster can look over the issue, as excessively generated links do hurt their site even more than yours. As for the links being do-follow that would be beneficial to your website is they weren't so excessive, so no need to mention that.

On the pages that you can't find the link, try opening "inspect element" or right-click on the page and click "view page source" and then find (ctrl+f) your site name.

If your URL shows up, then it means that the link is in a hidden section of the site. If it doesn't show up it means that the link has been removed but Moz hasn't crawled the site yet to update it.

If the links seem too spammy for you and the webmaster doesn't fix them, then you can disavow the domains until a later time when the issues are resolved.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com