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.