Bad Links Skewing Anchor Text Ratio

CaptainHustle

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Apr 30, 2020
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Dear builders,

I noticed that I am getting a lot of spammy backlinks from Blogspot websites. Normally, I would ignore this because Google is pretty good at ignoring them. However, something I noticed is that these links are consciously using a variety of toxic anchor texts (like viagra and casino) and pointing them to my site.

Is this something you would ignore? Or do I need to manually disavow them? That is a pain but I wouldn't mind doing that.

I remember someone saying that their traffic went off a cliff because the spammy anchor texts tipped the scale.
 
The answer varies but your accounting of "a lot". "A lot" can mean 100s per day to some, or 5 links per week to others.

If you are running a white hat squeaky clean site it's best to continuously monitor backlinks and disavow them. I believe @Ryuzaki has more on this topic since I believe it was him that talks about having a running disavow files that he keeps updating.

If you are getting 100s of bad backlinks per day then it's clearly someone, most likely a competitor, attempting a negative SEO attack. And yes they do work.

Well I guess the answer doesn't vary, just keep disavowing and pray you aren't in an niche/topic that's prone to negative SEO tactics.
 
@CCarter maybe its just me... but I wouldn't be content with just disavowing.

Is there a way to counter attack?
 
CaptainHustle said:
Is this something you would ignore? Or do I need to manually disavow them? That is a pain but I wouldn't mind doing that.
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Everyone gets pounded by these stupid blogspot automated networks. Google allows for them to be registered and hosted for free and most certainly knows about their existence, and I don't see that they ever get deleted. All my sites have an accumulation of zillions of these things.

In the past I actually recovered a site for someone for 50% of the future revenue, and the issue turned out being tens of thousands of auto-generated blogspot links pointing at their images. Blew my mind that you could get a link penalty for linking to images. I disavowed the entirety of blogspot and all the subdomains and it cleared right up.

CCarter said:
I believe @Ryuzaki has more on this topic since I believe it was him that talks about having a running disavow files that he keeps updating.
Click to expand...
Continuing the story from above, that was years and years ago. You could wipe out the entirety of Blogspot in one line in the disavow. But I no longer maintain a disavow file. It got to the point where instead of doing it monthly I had to do it twice per month, and I eventually decided to test and see if Google really had it under control or not. You figure that we don't hear about a million websites getting link penalties any more, which they would if all this spam was a problem. So I just let it ride now and I'm not seeing anything but growth while ignoring spam altogether.

Blogspot auto-blogs, Wikipedia re-uploads, Alexa lists, Keyword research sites, Image scrapers & linkers, the amount of spam I get every day is endless. I'm surprised at how much of it Ahrefs picks up. I'm looking now and in the past 24 hours I have 55 new blogspot shitters linking to me, 2 new image scrapers, and 2 new "twitter search engines" that aren't nofollowing their links. Did get a real DR30 though!

So yeah, it's literally unmaintainable at this point. If I saw something sophisticated and not just auto-spam, then I'd probably disavow it. Like someone using a purposeful PBN to try to make it look like I built it. But even then I think Google will just destroy the PBN and discount the links and leave the target site alone. I truly do feel like they're ignoring links now and letting spammers waste their time.

CaptainHustle said:
Bad Links Skewing Anchor Text Ratio
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A fun question is does disavowing a link mean disavowing it's anchor text or not. Because all disavow does is cause Google to add an "internal" nofollow tag to a link the next time it crawls it. But does Google ignore nofollow anchor texts? I don't think so. At least in the past they were definitely used in link calculations because I found some neat tricks to rank easily manipulating the ratios using nofollow links.

That could be different now, and it could be that Google does ignore anchor text from disavowed links. A trusted friend of mine only last week assured me that he's fixed sites with anchor text problem by doing a very stringent disavow. Take it all for what you will, you know.

But the only way we can really look at our anchor text ratios is through SaaS's like Ahrefs or whatever, and Ahrefs does allow you to upload your disavow file to strip all the crap out of your data. Whether or not that lets you clean up your anchor text profile on Ahrefs, I don't know as I've not done it. But if they do clean up the profile from whatever disavow file you upload, that could possibly indicate that they think Google does the same.

JOoa0ky said:
Is there a way to counter attack?
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Counter attack who? Who's registering a million Blogspots every day? Where on the planet do they live? What are their real websites if any? Even if you identify them, what are you going to do? Sue someone in some bulletproof country? If there's anyone to blame it's Google for letting Blogspot be used this way. Not much we're going to do to them either. We don't even know why these stupid spammers create these flogs in the first place, but at least they keep all the spiders crawling.

Thankfully none of this appears to have any effect and we don't have to waste our time with fantasies of revenge. We can just focus on continuing to make money.
 
Ryuzaki said:
Blogspot auto-blogs, Wikipedia re-uploads, Alexa lists, Keyword research sites, Image scrapers & linkers, the amount of spam I get every day is endless. I'm surprised at how much of it Ahrefs picks up. I'm looking now and in the past 24 hours I have 55 new blogspot shitters linking to me, 2 new image scrapers, and 2 new "twitter search engines" that aren't nofollowing their links. Did get a real DR30 though!
Click to expand...
I've been wondering how these links come about and glad to hear I'm not the only one mystified. What's the best way to filter out spam links in ahrefs though? I usually rank by DR and filter by in-content but this doesn't help too much
 
So disavow actually gets positively correlated SERP results that can be linked to filling in the disavow file.....

Repeat it explicitly for me like I’m stupid.

To go further along the rabbit hole is there a reason to do all the garbage you can find with crawlers like majestic or ahrefs? Go beyond what google acknowledges in search console.
 
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