Massive influx of links

[bernard]

Thanks for translating my jibberish into easily understandable context. I'm sure Bernard is grateful too.

TL/DR.

Joking, I'll try this stuff on my site and report back.

 

[chubes]

@Grind if this is successful, will we see the links drop out of GSC? Or is the only indicator of success based on rankings?

 

[Grind]

I don't put my shit in GSC so I'm the wrong person to ask.

I focus on important things.

Not directed at you but general announcement, don't message me asking for the video, I took it down.

Too many fucking idiots in this industry, some thought it would be a good idea to run it past the white hat snitch crowd to 'get their feedback'. You know, the types that tag Meuller and carry Google's water for them by ratting out 'spam' sites.

SPAM = Sites Placed Above Mine

I don't need another Google Colonscopy by becoming a whack-a-mole target. Sorry not sorry.

If we've broke bread together (literally or figuratively) in the past, I'm happy to help. Otherwise, good luck bros, taking it back underground.

 

[chubes]

Feel that. I saw that stuff on Twitter. Wasn't planning to ask for the video, just trying to learn how I know if my efforts have been effective.

I'm assuming the links will drop out of the SEMrush backlink audit / GSC when you get them crawled.

If a site is not active but the link still registers, and you get Google to crawl it. That should essentially remove the URL from the Google index and thus remove the backlink from your site.

At least that is my understanding.

 

[chubes]

I get it now... Link Research Tools lets you track which links you've already disavowed. That was the feature I needed. This shit is quite expensive but the process of manual review is just not a feasible task.

 

[Grind]

At least that is my understanding.

You could be 100% right. I wasn't being sarcastic when I said I don't put stuff in GSC until I need to disavow. So I spend zero time looking at their reporting otherwise.

I get it now... Link Research Tools lets you track which links you've already disavowed. That was the feature I needed. This shit is quite expensive but the process of manual review is just not a feasible task.

You don't 100% need it but your backlink total from other sources had better be pretty close to the LRT total or else you're just wasting your time.

Sometimes Ahref + Majestic gets you 90% of the way there, sometimes they don't even sniff 30% of what LRT shows.

Doing disavows and crawls with some of the links vs the majority of them is night and day when it comes to results.

And yeah, it's expensive af. Plus a big time commitment.

People are asking me about this constantly now (big surprise there, keep your mouth shut Grind, dummy) and I always tell them to let traffic value be the deciding factor.

If your site was making a few thousand a month, fuck it move on. If it was making 50k+/month, well that's a diff conversation.

Sorry for not multi quoting, I'm dumb.

 

[chubes]

If your site was making a few thousand a month, fuck it move on. If it was making 50k+/month, well that's a diff conversation.

Moving on really isn't an option... this business has been my baby since I was 18 years old. I'm going balls to the wall and disavowing thousands of spam backlinks.

Already spent hours upon hours digging through various reports before I finally bought SEMrush.

The number doesn't even compare. I had 700 something done by hand, and within 30 minutes of buying SEMrush i've quadrupled that.

15,000 spam backlinks. 50% toxicity score. A bigger, competing site that tried to buy me out last year coincidentally has none of this going on.

I'm not going to fight dirty. I'm building a fucking impenetrable fortress.

 

[Grind]

Checking the backlink count on SEMrush vs the homepage of LRT will tell you how many they have in the database for your site. If the numbers aren't close, SEMrush won't be enough on it's own.

Sorry if that makes me the bearer of bad news.

 

[chubes]

SEMrush backlink analytics says i have 88k total backlinks. LRT says 58k total backlinks.

 

[Grind]

Nice one. I don't know anything about SEMrush toxic link scoring but I'll be doing some research.

 

[CCarter]

night and day

What's night and day is the conversation over here and then compare it to XSEO while trying to help that Samantha girl, and seeing SEO-theory guys take.

I have a feeling they know you are right but would much rather not believe because it goes against their identity and ideology. They are going to die on that hill because its who they are.

No point in wasting energy towards the dead. They're NPCs:

Everyone else should be more than grateful that there IS a method out of the madness. What they plan on doing about it is up to them.

 

[chubes]

I saw a Tweet about math that made a lot of sense. Especially knowing that Google is trying to crack down on spam. They have no way of knowing that you didn't make those links yourself.

If you have 1000 good, natural backlinks vs 15,000 spam backlinks. The odds are not in your favor.

Super grateful to have found this forum and for all the people here who share insights and contribute to the discussions.

Not out of the woods yet but I just disavowed 5000+ domains. This is the first time since September that I've found what seems to be a legitimate clue.

 

[CCarter]

I just disavowed 5000+ domains.

Just an FYI, you need to disavow the URLs, not just the domains. That was specified in the video. Then get the URLs that were spamming you recrawled.

 

[chubes]

Just an FYI, you need to disavow the URLs, not just the domains. That was specified in the video. Then get the URLs that were spamming you recrawled.

Thanks Chief. Got damn this is a lot of work... and you have to be careful when you're doing it in bulk that you don't accidentally disavow your personal blog haha ... speaking from experience

 

[Politico]

SEMrush backlink analytics says i have 88k total backlinks. LRT says 58k total backlinks.

Wow recently got LRT for a disavow campaign and the domain had ~13k links showing.

Checked SEMRush's Backlink Audit section today and the domain has ~34k links found

 

[Clint Butler]

@Grind if this is successful, will we see the links drop out of GSC? Or is the only indicator of success based on rankings?

You will, but it takes a while, better to watch your traffic

 

[Grind]

Wow recently got LRT for a disavow campaign and the domain had ~13k links showing.

Checked SEMRush's Backlink Audit section today and the domain has ~34k links found

So since @chubes mentioned this yesterday, I've seen 4 more instances of people telling me that SEMrush had a bigger link database than LRT which basically ensures it's bigger than AHREFS.

Feel like I've been sleeping at the wheel.

What's night and day is the conversation over here and then compare it to XSEO while trying to help that Samantha girl, and seeing SEO-theory guys take.

I have a feeling they know you are right but would much rather not believe because it goes against their identity and ideology. They are going to die on that hill because its who they are.

No point in wasting energy towards the dead. They're NPCs:

Everyone else should be more than grateful that there IS a method out of the madness. What they plan on doing about it is up to them.

Yeah, I gave up. 100% snark mode over there now.

Got a few of the self important blowhards to block me, I'll take that as a small win and time to move on.

Until one of these bigger (in infamy) sites that I've helped out reports back that they regained 50% of their traffic and then I'll be in their mentions telling them to SMDFTB daily.

 

[Positivity]

Ahrefs picks up about 28% of links on the dozen or so disavow recovery projects I've done.

Disavowing some of the crap but not all isn't how you win this game, use Link Research Tools instead. Expensive but necessary.

Would you say putting 3-5% of revenue (or more) towards this is needed on an on-going basis?

 

[chubes]

I have some confusing links that I'm not sure about. The sites seem normal enough on the first glance but upon closer inspection my gut kind of leans towards spam. But, it seems to be some kind of advanced level corporate spam if so. I'll lay it out here, maybe someone will know.

There is one post on my site that has a lot of links to it from duplicate articles, with duplicate anchors, on sites that are presented as "FM Radio Stations" (WordPress) and "News Sites" (Blox CMS). They have the same IP/layout and claim to be owned by "Townsquare Media" which is a publicly traded company.

The article that SEMrush / GSC claims to find the link in does not actually exist or contain the link. Sometimes it does exist, but the anchor is not there.

As many as 6 links to the same post from each domain in different (duplicated) articles. Over 200 different domains with the same IP linking to the same post, with the same nonexistent anchor.

Some of these sites have oddly small social media presence for a "newspaper" or "radio station" that actually exists. I went through a bunch and many of them have under 1000 IG followers and no recent activity, while others seem more legit (one is 25k followers and presents like a regular news outlet, for example). But they ALL have socials, some even Wikipedia pages, etc.

Would you disavow these links? Is this negative SEO or just some weird corporate thing?

Here, fuck it, some examples so you can see this shit. This company has hundreds of sites like this and they all claim to include a link to my site (some in SEMrush, some just in GSC):

News sites, Blox CMS

nwitimes.com
journalstar.com

Radio, WordPress

kidotalkradio.com
kool965.com

 

[Smith]

@chubes did you decide if you're disavowing? It would be interesting to see what all these come up as in terms of toxicity in LRT.

I ran LRT and I've been following the path @Grind explained. I'm also
manually digging into spam links via GSC looking at 404s. I have an insane number of URLs linking to pages on my site that don't exist... the URLs I'm seeing almost all look like:

https://bahdgd.kjasdjkh.de or .pl or .it (not a real example)

It looks like someone scrapped a few different sitemaps and then replaced the old domain with mine and then spammed my site with links from shit domains... resulting in well-orchestrated chaos. Well played asshole. Of course, the influx of shit links to non-existing pages lines up beautifully with my site's collapse at the end of last year.

Like I said, most of the URLs I'm seeing when I inspect these 404s are made up of random characters with a similarly random subdomain followed by a TLD from Poland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and maybe a few other countries. And almost all of these URLs are no longer live or they redirect to a spam site.

But about 30% of the 404s I'm checking have this instead of a spam link:

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to find the source for a 404 when Google doesn't even share it with you?

Also, just wondering...

Let's say you suspect that someone ordered up a negative SEO attack on your site. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to track down whoever placed the order to send them a thank you note?

And is there any way to protect against this kind of shit in the future?

 

[chubes]

I'm leaning towards a disavow on them because of @CCarter's post in the algorithm thread. I've got nothing to lose, as my pages have already been tanked. Can't really hurt, is my line of thinking.

I'm not sure if it was a malicious attempt but it seems pretty sketchy to me that they would operate such a big business this way. I just don't really understand the thought process behind such large-scale content syndication.

SEMrush does not consider them toxic... but I kind of do.

For links ending in /1000

I also found a bunch of other links in my GSC indexing tab under "page with redirect" and all the urls ended in /1000 ... coming from spam sites with malware redirects. WordPress caused them to resolve to the page minus /1000 via its auto-redirect featured. None of these were picked up by SEMrush for the record.

JohnMu from Google responded to the influx of questions about this and said they are nothing to worry about... this is the Google guy I probably trust the least... it's almost like do the opposite of what he says.

I handled it with the following code (for anyone who wants to do the same)

in .htaccess (at the top):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /1000$
RewriteRule ^ - [R=404,L]

(serves a 404 on all urls ending in /1000 at the server level, effectively stopping the spam from reaching your site)

in robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*/1000$

(instructs search engines not to crawl any urls ending in /1000)

 

[mikey3times]

https://bahdgd.kjasdjkh.de or .pl or .it (not a real example)

I have a ton of these on multiple sites as well. I haven't noticed them before so they must be new within the last few months.

Let's say you suspect that someone ordered up a negative SEO attack on your site. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to track down whoever placed the order to send them a thank you note?

Based on my comment above, it looks like this is just as common as the image link spam. Are you sure someone targeted you? If so, how did you come to that conclusion?

 

[Smith]

Are you sure someone targeted you?

I'm not sure about anything... at all.

That's why I decided to take a multi-pronged approach to try and recover my site/rankings.

I just hit publish here 30 seconds ago explaining all the tactics/strategies I'm using.

 

[MinstrelJunkie]

Gentlemen, I come seeking disavow advice

I've been following Grind's method as best I can. Bit the bullet and got LinkResearchTools, just finished spending 2 straight days trawling through pages and pages of links.

Out of 10,925 links to the site, I've lined up 10,136 for a disavow. Only keeping 789 good links.

That means I'd be disavowing 93% of the links to our site...

I've never done this before so that's ringing major alarm bells. But I'm confident that every disavowed link is trash, toxic, or just not natural.

The process I went through:

• Give LRT as much data as possible (GSC access + Ahrefs export)
• Work backwards from highest DTOX score
• Generally trusted the DTOX score, disavow anything that's clearly spam
• Anything not obvious, manually check the page + Ahrefs toolbar metrics
• If still not obvious, put into Ahrefs. Look at site's history and whether Google likes the site. For example a DA12 with 200 pages and still gets some traffic = keep. A DA60 with thousands of pages, zero Google traffic, and yellow toxic score? Disavow
• 90% of the red scores were disavows, probably 60-70% of the yellow scores too. The greens were decent but still disavowed 20-30% of them.

Found some clear negative SEO attacks, especially one where 400 different links were using the same exact match anchor text to one page... not to mention tons of the same templated spam comments/PBN looking sites.

I guess I'm seeking a shot of confidence that it's not insane to disavow 93% of our links.

This is on a site with 1,500-ish pages, so we'll have more pages than links. But I'm pretty confident in each of the disavows.

Do I pull the trigger? Any sanity checks worth doing first?

 

[CCarter]

This you?

Sites have been absolutely clobbered continously since Jan 2023. Every update hitting us harder than before. Despite spending most of my 2023 and $60,000+ on improving the main site according to Google's Guidelines and Twitter SEOs.

I hired experts to review articles, embedded YouTube clips of the experts giving advice into matching articles, included our own images, edited every single piece of content for helpfulness, deleted and 410/301'd anything below quality standard or not relevant, overhauled the site for UX and speed.

At peak we had 750k sessions/month. Now we're lucky if we get 50k sessions. I've had to fire my whole team, who were fantastic people. Only dabbled in buying a few links after we were hit, but maybe 10 niche edits in the lifetime of the site. Did do well with HARO links (HuffPost, Yahoo, CNet, etc).

That said I believe we're a lost cause

Remember your pain.

From 750K sessions a month to 50K, you had to fire your whole team who were fantastic people. Spent $60K in improvements based off of - TWITTER SEOs... :rolls_eyes:

You believe you are a lost cause.

You were using Link Whisper on all your sites that were continuously clobbered since Jan 2023, harder each time. I think if you look at your analytics you'll see the slide probably started Dec 2022 - that's the internal anchor update.

You have nothing to lose as far I as I can see.

Now you have to go into your internal anchors and adjust them while you wait the 48-96 hours for the disavow list to get processed, then go in with the 3 services to get those disavowed links indexed/crawled.

750K to 50K is losing 93% of your traffic. That's a massive lost. Ironically you are also disavowing 93% of your links - hmm...

On the other hand, TwitterSEO is saying to do nothing or rather SEP - Search Engine Pray.

What are you going to do?

A long time ago I heard this advice: "The worse thing you can do is nothing. The best thing you can do is the right move. The 2nd best thing you can do is the wrong move - because at least you are in momentum and can pivot. Standing still is zero momentum."

You are better off doing something instead of doing nothing.

I hope you come back and show us with screenshots of your traffic improvement. If you did it right I'm 1000% sure you'll recover.