Negative SEO attack or just a low quality PBN linking randomly to me?

[WhiteHatNormie]

Today, 9 new reffering domains popped up in google search console. All have names like "wp-maintainence-agreement.gq

They are all from these 3 countries: Mali (.ml), Gabon (.ga) and Equatorial Guineea (.gq).

The websites are made out of automatically spun content that is unreadable. For some reason they are not blasted with spam, all have zero links. At least zero links showing up in seo tools. Most of their articles do not link out at all, but some link appearantly randomly to websites from the web design/plug-in field.

Should I disavow these links? Is this a negative SEO attack or just a random PBN linking out towards websites from it's field? Isn't disavowing them dangerous, since this is exactly what google dance is designed to make you do? If I disavow these links while in google dance, the website will get penalized.

Has this thing ever happened to you? Is this something normal that happens to all websites?

 

[KingZen]

I've had negative SEO performed on one of my websites. I disavowed just so that it didn't effect my rankings. If you don't recognize the links, might as well disavow them. Especially if they are extremely low quality.

 

[bartosimpsonio]

Most the time you can ignore those but if you want to be safe then disavow them.

 

[work30hard]

it affects your ranking, id suggest you to disavow

 

[WhiteHatNormie]

Thanks so much guys, but I still don't understand what's up with these websites. They have like 15 posts in total (per website), all automatically created and unreadable. Very few of the posts have links.

What bothers me is that the only common website linked from these websites appears to be mine. Also, my links are on anchors such as "wordpress" or "service". But on the other hand the websites are not blasted with spam and there is no reason for an SEO attack in my field and situation.

I am not sure whether I should remove these or not. Can this be simply a guy who randomly linked to me from his PBN?

 

[rafark]

Thanks . Can this be simply a guy who randomly linked to me from his PBN?

If that were the case, what if he messes up and gets his PBN penalized? If his PBN went down, so would your site.

 

[agent-x]

I wouldn't bother disavowing. As long as you have strong links elsewhere these shouldn't hurt you, in fact you might even see them as giving you some anchor text diversification for free. As a site gets older and gains authority it picks up links like this.