Spam Links

Hello,

Over the past few months, we've noticed a significant influx of spam links through services like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Google Search Console. All of these links point to two specific pages on our website.

1) An example of a referenced page: http://website.com/support (the page has been closed from indexing for over a year and is not found in search).

Spam links have the following format: http://website.com/support?referer=https://notifications.google.com/g/p/ANiao5pFYxm8-94YsrTqfLPye9YSN7d0obwwKID2WPdBNHuCqmtWc5Q3bSZdynf_0C3s94eC3Pbf0b5sF5nY1-sDdDruVSpAQAj7ZMJHDrW9oc8441jLRnTRAIjpgPVdN3BD0WU6AV409a35fSBipgWMeA8q3DpZsygzn_Pkf80N2_pcg1Yn0mh3Vay5pS2KtcMItIBMIxKZ3h3eY-29zCcKsa6LXRI-PnxR3WY

2) The links lead to a page that does not exist 404. (we have removed this page for more than half a year).

The sources of these links range from adult websites, casino sites, free blogs, and more. Some of the most common top linking texts include:

• Pilar805
• Gobets
• Slot 5000
• Slot Kamboja
• Slot Vietnam

On a daily basis, we observe approximately +/- 150-200 links from around 60 different domains. Initially, when this was not as widespread, we would add such links to the Disavow Links tool provided by Google (https://notifications.google.com/g/p/ANiao5pk1wDlvCDwheP_XJ39VusmB6ZW6Qh0aDDUNmBdLYndY62l7fWsyw8_9AZO4PnkQvQ_t_hGIu6wh5qqoXnMo6VvZRJvftNjQ2xarZZZHryZ-h_hR3KRDcKne4M_Ia0ENqGDDJb0qn68kW3zVYnq1McpRzdxHYg9njr3-A1ZMla4ZEmzxqYHH-B61Mq3UyPS0s8tO1qroGGUi0m5OoudlXDvCR78_smqpEZhLgOK_9jSOVIHX0s).

However, we've ceased doing this now as the issue has become widespread. We would greatly appreciate your advice and recommendations.

Should we continue using the Disavow Links tool, or should we refrain from using it altogether?

Thank you for your time and assistance.

Best regards,

Are you noticing any rank decreases in relation to these links appearing? Every website that has a footprint in competitive SERPs ends up with a load of weird links pointing to them, usually down to poorly coded bots or badly parsed data.

Hi, yes unfortunately the site is experiencing a downward trend in traffic on all pages this has been happening since mid 2023. (and around this period we started to receive such links)

I'm not a disavow user myself, but I believe you can disavow whole domains in your disavow file by prefixing them with domain:. If it's still the same ~60 domains that the spam is coming from, it should be easy enough to maintain your disavow file by using that syntax.

If the links are only going to 2 specific pages, and those pages really do not exist any more, it might be worth just giving a 410 gone HTTP response for them instead of the 404. This signals a permanent dead url.

Thanks for the reply.

I'm not a disavow user myself, but I believe you can disavow whole domains in your disavow file by prefixing them with domain:. If it's still the same ~60 domains that the spam is coming from, it should be easy enough to maintain your disavow file by using that syntax.

Click to expand...

These are new domains every time..

If the links are only going to 2 specific pages, and those pages really do not exist any more, it might be worth just giving a 410 gone HTTP response for them instead of the 404. This signals a permanent dead url.

Click to expand...

410 response code is a great suggestion, we are just working on it, thank you!

Only use Disavow if you're seeing a rankings drop that correlates with the spam links. Google’s algo can usually sniff out and ignore the junk.

Only use Disavow if you're seeing a rankings drop that correlates with the spam links. Google’s algo can usually sniff out and ignore the junk.

Click to expand...

It's a little confusing to me that I have to add 60 such domains every day....and most importantly, we don't see any improvement(

It may seem like you're a victim of negative SEO and the fact that they keep using different domains to trash your site tends to support this suspicion.

While a lot of people would use the Google disavow tool, the downside with that approach is that it really doesn't help all that much unless the pages exist which you say they don't anymore or the target pages exist which they don't anymore or there is a actual significant decrease of traffic since the spam links appeared.

If any of the two above conditions is true you might want to consider the disavow tool but if they don't apply to you and I don't think they do, you might want to consider other reasons why your traffic is declining.

You also need to pay attention to the rate of decline because there might be other issues with your site that may be causing this.