Not existing domains linking to my website (spam)

[benhond]

Hello,

When i run my platform www.taobao.nl through https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/ i see a lot of nasty adult domains that link to my platform. These give a very negative (spam)score to my platform.

I already disavowed quite a few via Webmastertools, but they keep coming.

When i check the names in the Whois, they don't even seem to exist! (anymore)

What could cause this and how can i end it??

Thanks for your help!

Sander

[Supporting]

We have had this very same thing occur, XXX spammy links, among many others attacks.

We found this was a competitor wanting our market share.  They hired kiddy scripters to do the dirty deed of the spammy links which apparently is easy to find people who are always trying to hack XXX sites.  The end results is to ruin your Google backlinking ratings, i.e. in general hurt your overall Goolgle authority and rankings.

The secondary result it ties up your time and takes you away from running your business which also is to their advantage.

The sad part is that there is no way to protect your self from these low life tactics.

Unfortunately, we expeirenced simultaniously robo call attacks taking down our phone systems and over filing our voice mail and at the same time, had every email account know to the general public submitted to spammers to fil up our servers and mail boxes.  Definetly a planned set of events.

They topped it off with constant DDOS attacks, and attempted SQL injections and any other thing they could think of. Of course this makes the customers unsure if were still in business because the site was up and down and of course they wondered if it was even safe to shop.  This has gone on for 3 years, until we finally found a safe hosting arrangement, 12 moves later and have extra phone and email security measures in place.   We are still fighting to get back in Google's good graces.

Again all taking time away from running your buisness.

So a few spammy links to keep up with disavowing, no problem. Count your blessings. (-:

[benhond]

Thanks for the complete answer!

I indeed added domains at the second level, so i should be good on that.

WRT the organic traffic. There are more issues to overcome  https://moz.com/community/q/i-m-invisible

I figured these bad links might have something to do with that.

Regards, Sander

[CleverPhD]

Just to clarify above and add a little bit.

The Disavow file to Google only goes to Google.  Even when you submit it there, and Google confirms that it has the new copy, it takes a while (several months) for Google to then account for the domains you are Disavowing. i.e. Don't expect an immediate effect from Google in what you see in Search Console and/or in the SERPs.  Also, side note, you should generally disavow at the domain level as once you have a bad link from a site, the whole site is probably not worth it and it makes your job easier if there are a bunch of links from the same domain.  Also, spammers will use a subdomains to create copies of the main site and add even more crappy links to your site.  Disavowing the domain takes care of the subdomain as well. The exception to this would be sites that are on wordpress, as all the subdomains would really be from different sites (you get the idea) so you would disavow at the subdomain level for those sites.

I have one site I run that gets a bunch of spam links to us built and so 1x to 2x a year I have to pull everything I can get from Moz, Majestic, Search Console, etc and find new domains to add to the Disavow file.  It sucks, but it helps even though Google's official line that they can account for negative SEO.

There are tools such as CognitiveSEO that will aggregate links for you from various sources and then you can upload your Disavow file there and it will then know to filter out all the links it finds from those domains to help you weed out what you need to audit and I have found this useful.

Continuing from previous answers, Moz has no idea what the disavow file you sent to Google contains and will not take that into account when it is looking for links.  You may see more links from the disavowed domains show up in Moz because of that.  This is where tools like CognitiveSEO are helpful in being able to sort out things.  I would hope that for MozPro members this would be a feature to add so that your OSE profile could account for Disavowed links.  I have found Moz helpful in using the Spam score to decide if I should disavow domains for Google.

Regarding your point about finding links to your sites and then the sites no longer exist.  That happens.  The Moz link database and also Google's databases are not updated in real time.  I have also seen that the links in Search Console are not up to date with what I see in Google search.  If you go to the sites and they are 404/410 Gone, you are probably fine.  I would say the disavow is a good conservative way to make sure that you are "safe" and would recommend that you move forward with that.   If the sites are gone (as mentioned above) Moz should show them gone in the next update or two (depending on if they crawled those sites or not).

Bottom line on all this is, are you seeing less organic traffic to your site?  All of the above may be a moo point if the bad sites that link to you are dead and potentially even Google is already ignoring them (and the disavow will make sure of that).  Google does not look at the Moz metrics and so it does not matter if the links are included in the Moz index as long as you know they are taken care of.  If your organic traffic is ok, then enjoy that coffee and relax as you submit the disavow file.

Cheers!

[DirkC]

Agree, coffee does make a difference. 3pm here in Europe so I already had my daily dose

[VERBInteractive]

Excellent point Dirk there can't be a direct relationship between Google Disavow and Moz's index.

Haven't had my coffee yet this morning.

[DirkC]

Hi,

I don't really agree with the answer of Verbinteractive: disavowing links in WMT only concerns Google - there is no way Moz OSE is able to know that these links have been disavowed.

If these sites no longer exist than it's quite possible they will disappear in OSE, but not because of the disavow. If the links are from crappy sites it's quite possible that Moz crawled them once, but is not crawling them again (while the number of pages they crawl is huge - it's still limited).

Wait for the next crawl (Sept. 9th) & if these links are still present I would contact Moz directly.

rgds

Dirk

[benhond]

Usually i receive the confirmation in WMT site messages the same day.

"http://www.taobao.nl/: Disavowed links updated"

[VERBInteractive]

You disavowed 6-7 weeks ago, is that when you submitted the disavow file or when you receive the notification in webmaster tools that the links were disavowed?

[benhond]

Hi,

I disavowed them for the 1st time 6-7 weeks ago. Since then new links emerged (i also see them in webmastertools) that i also disavowed.

The strange thing is that these domains that link to my platform (all adult crap) seem not to exist.

If someone can shed some light on this: much obliged

Sander

[VERBInteractive]

Hi Sander,

If you just recently disavowed these links you are going to have to wait for Moz to reindex in order to see your results change. The next crawl is scheduled to be completed for Sept 9th.

See: https://moz.com/products/api/updates If you don't see a change in your Spam Score at that point I would dig deeper at that point.

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