Massive influx of links

[NotaLawyer]

So today I found I had a bunch of odd URLs in GSC showing as linking to my site, but most of the pages were blank when visited in a normal browser.

Neat trick to test. Change the user agent to Googlebot and you might be able to see the real page with complete source code.

Chrome Dev Tools > Network Conditions > User Agent
Select "Custom"
Add this as the user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36

At first I was thinking "why put in the effort to add these sites, there's nothing there" but then when the real page was exposed I could see someone was targeting all my top pages. Cool trick to hide it from everyone except Google.

The other fun thing about seeing the source code of those pages is that I was able to find the publish dates of those pages. Guess what I noticed when checking organic traffic to the pages linked from the shit sites? hm... Trying to not jump to conclusions about what caused the drops in traffic, but it's kind of hard to look at anything else.

These pages pop up targeting only my important pages (were high ranking), no other real competitors on the page. Core updates happen, pages continue to drop. We make content changes. Core update and page traffic continues to drop.

Updated Disavow (40% complete maybe?) on the way. Adding time into my calendar to keep updating. We'll see what happens.

 

[Smith]

Considering that it's not relevant to your niche, my checklist would be:

• Is the poker site ranking well in Google? If it's dead, probably disavow
• Are the anchors exact match, strong partial match, or targetting images on your site? If so, probably disavow
• Is the DTOX Score (if you have LRT) >500? If so, probably disavow
• But if the anchors are natural, the site's traffic is steady/growing, and the site's backlink profile seems good? Probably keep

Thanks for the checklist - I followed your exact steps and decided it wasn't worth keeping the links.

The pages were dead, and the site was already declining, and not getting much traffic. I already cancelled LRT so couldn't check the DTOX. But with the other details, I was happy to cull the links.

 

[Smith]

Received some sage advice from @Darth that I added to my clean-up and filtering process that I outlined earlier in the thread. Figured I would share it here in case anyone is lurking and copying the process... if so, you do not want to skip this step.

Basically, since we're dealing with such large sets of data and it can be easy for desirable domains/urls to slip through the cracks, pull the quality/high authority sites that you want to keep from SEO tools (SEM & ahrefs) and use those as the foundation for a "clean domain" list. I also added a list of all paid backlinks and then earned backlinks that I knew I needed to keep.

I'm using Sheets to manage all of this. So I simply added conditions to highlight any duplicates in my disavow list. Anytime one of the clean domains was accidentally added to the list of domains I was going to disavow, I was alerted and I could then go and make the necessary changes.

I used a similar approach for the URL list, though I first had to pull the root domain for comparison to my clean list. This was pretty quick since I just used a series of REGEXEXTRACT to pull the root, quickly filtered, removed any duplicates, and compared the resulting list to the clean domains. If any of my clean domains appeared, I manually went through and removed the related URLs.

This ended up being an EXTREMELY important step as I would have accidentally disavowed ~7k in high DR paid backlinks from the last year (facepalm) along with a few high DR earned backlinks that I obviously wanted to keep. Maybe I'm the only person that would have made these mistakes... maybe not.

If you're following this process and there's any chance you might miss some high DR domains, I highly recommend following Darth's advice and creating a "clean domain" list to save any headaches later. But, don't forget to remove the clean domains before disavowing.

I'm now in the waiting game... going to keep pushing through on internal anchors in the meantime.