Sudden spike in backlinks - should we disavow?
-
A kitchen remodelling firm in Australia has noticed a big increase in spammy backlinks to their website since April this year. Majestic shows that referring domains and backlinks during that period have gone up from 400 domains (10,000 links) to 1,070 domains (47,000+ links). About 100 are sitewide links.
The vast majority are "follow" links directed at image files on the site - ending in .jpg. Ahrefs now shows the number one anchor text (23%) is a period (full stop) "." Most of the links come from .us domains, eg:
cowboysr.us
blackphoto.us
alldpic.comGoogle Search Console isn't showing any of these links, there's no penalty on the site and there's been no noticeable change in rankings (if anything organic clicks went up over May, June, July) ... so we're wondering what action - if any - should be taken.
Are these links likely to have a negative impact on the site and homepage? Should we disavow these links?
Appreciate any advice. Thanks.
-
Thanks Igor - none of these sites look legit. All have low to non-existent metrics like trust flow. We'll go through the list and disavow.
Any thoughts on what the purpose of these scraped image links are - is this a form of negative SEO?
-
Even if flow metrics on those links are good, the sudden spike is already a red flag for search engines.
If those links aren't organic get rid of them.
I'd get a list of referring domains and bulk check the domain metrics (age, pr, trust flow and etc) and if there's nothing good - get rid of them.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I disavow these links?
Hi all, I have a site that is a year old, we have been building backlinks organically - probably around 50 or so - then almost overnight we had100s of spammy links. Screenshot here: https://ibb.co/cijiub My questions: Should I disavow these? What happens if I don't disavow these? Can I work out where they came from? If I disavow a few of them, is this a token offering to the Google Gods that will lower my risk of being penalised? Thank you. cijiub
Link Building | | Bee1591 -
Backlinks - Linking to new domain
Hello Moz community! My established client recently franchised their business by adding a metro area location. We have thousands of back links built to the corporate website, a lot of which have anchor text that are geo-targeted to the new metro area website. We still find the corporate website important, but would rather focus our efforts now on the newly franchised location. Does anyone have experience with successfully having old links changed to a new domain and if so how? When changing directory listings, such as everything on get listed, is it better do do slowly or as much at once as possible? Any recommendations or information would be appreciated! Thanks!
Link Building | | FullMedia900 -
Is there added benefit to having a link profile with backlinks from other countries?
I haven't been able to find any articles to back this up, but I remember hearing that having backlinks from diverse geographic locations is a positive ranking factor. Thanks!
Link Building | | DA20130 -
Backlinks, how do you get them?
Recently, I listed our site on a few directory's which I deemed as not spammy and had good domain authority (competitors were using these). This was about 2 weeks ago and have not seen them come up as a backlink using open site explorer? I was wondering whether i'm missing something out here or does it take longer than 2 weeks to gain a backlink from a website? Thanks in advance.
Link Building | | PeterAllen910 -
Backlinks not showing in OSE
Hi I have been undertaking back linking for our website and have submitted our site to a range of online directories and quite a few of them are currently live. However when I download the Open site explorer report I'm not seeing these links included in the back link list. Can anyone tell me when they are likely to appear please?
Link Building | | Hardley0 -
Homepage vs specific page Backlink
Hello, I have a local business and have been working on getting backlinks for highly relevant keywords. I have keyword optimized pages (keyword in URL, title, H1, etc) but I have been sending backlinks to the homepage, as these keywords represent the core of what we offer. See example below: car repair car repair london auto repair auto repair london I have been sending backlinks (with the correct anchor text of course) to the homepage, am I better off sending them to the specific pages? One more thing: the SEOMOZ report talks about cannibalisation of keywords, where for example the page optimised for "car repair" links to "Car repair london". I have links to the optimised pages in a footer at the bottom of every single page on the website, is this bad practice? (considering SEOMOZ talks about cannibalisation? Should I do something else instead (or eliminate the footer links altogether?) I would appreciate your expert advice.
Link Building | | dpaq20110 -
Should I Just Copy A Competitor's Backlinks?
Forgive the newbie question, but now that I have found SeoMoz and OpenSiteExplorer, should I just piggy back on my competitors backlinks? What would be the downside? By way of explanation, I've never had the need to explore SEO before. Our site, Widgets.com has always ranked highly for all Widgets keywords because we have the keyword in our domain and our site has been around since 1998. But out of the blue this summer, a site, let's call them WidgetsCircus.com suddenly began outranking us on widgets keywords, and pretty much every keyword we can imagine in our little widget universe. Now that I have run OpenSiteExplorer, I can see how they've done it. They've pretty much spent the last year commenting on blog posts all over the place, editing wiki pages, etc., and built thousands of links for all these widget keywords. So, I'm wondering: why shouldn't I just go down the list of links and do exactly what they've done? Where they commented on a blog, why don't I just comment right along side them. Obviously, this has worked for them! Wouldn't it work for us too? Or is that too simple?
Link Building | | brianmcc0