Spam, backlinks
How to Disavow Spammy Links to Your Website
Like cockroaches, you don’t want these pests connected to you!
You work hard to make great posts to make a great website. You want to do things right and good. Then along comes a backlink to a spammy website you don’t want.
How did it get there?
Some unethical person or bot made it a point to link a low-quality website to your site. The content of the low-quality website doesn’t match yours nor even come close to it. It’s often not related topically. For example, it could be an X-rated trash site trying to harm your site by linking to it.
You might see a spike in traffic from countries not usually in your core audience. You will need to use a tool to find all these spammy backlinks and where they come from. I use Neil Patel’s UberSuggest because not only does it provide a list of backlinks, but also a number of other useful tools for scanning the health of your site.
When I discovered my old website had suddenly gained about a hundred new backlinks, I was disgusted. The same way you would be if you saw a cockroach in your kitchen near the food. You’d want to stomp it out fast and prevent further roaches from multiplying.
How do you get rid of the unwanted pests?
I used Google’s disavow tool located in the webmaster portal. Be very careful about following their explicit instructions. It can cost your website traffic a loss if you do something wrong.
In particular, I had made ten blog posts after visiting a travel blog conference in Czechia several years ago. I had inserted links to Czech tourism offices, some hotels, and places of information that I experienced. It took years before some of those links became spammy while linking to my site. They were in another language too. Sites that end in .xyz are not really sites but spam operators.
I uploaded 127 spammy links using the Google disavow procedure and so far, only a few are still showing as linking to my site. There is no webmaster to these sites. When you try to find their site you get the DNS assist error. Really crappy stuff to deal with. But it is a cautionary tale you can learn from.