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Dealing with a ton of toxic backlinks

Google disavow tool questions

         

hairfarmer

7:06 pm on Aug 3, 2023 (gmt 0)



Long time lurker, first time poster. I work for a company that produces and manages a lot of domestic and international business listing sites. We saw a couple steep drops in traffic around October of last year, and a few weeks ago we realized that it could very likely have been caused by a huge amount of toxic backlinks to our sites.

So for the past few weeks I've been using Semrush and Google Search Console to find and disavow the domains that are spamming toxic backlinks to our listing directory sites. I'm posting because I've been unable to find much documentation on dealing with this problem, and I was hoping anyone that has been dealing with toxic backlinks longer might have some insights or info that might help me get on top of this. I've already hit the 100,000 line/2mb limit for disavowal files for one of our sites and the spammy backlinks just keep coming. My boss has set up Majestic and Ahrefs plans, so I have access to those in addition to Semrush. I'm just asking for guidance or pointers on dealing with this. Thanks for reading my post :P

not2easy

7:31 pm on Aug 3, 2023 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Hi hairfarmer and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

I would not bother disavowing links you did not initiate. If you did not buy or post the links, it is not your problem to disavow. Google will remove them in a week or so without any action. Others will likely replace them. I have found that they drop off the GSC screen with no action at all. The disavow form was created a long time ago when paid links were everywhere and people who saw the error of it could disavow them. But it is not your job to clean up others' problems.

Back in 2019 Google started discouraging the use of their disavow tools: [webmasterworld.com...]

hairfarmer

11:00 pm on Aug 4, 2023 (gmt 0)



The problem is, I believe our sites are being targeted by a negative seo campaign, possibly by a competitor. So we don't really have a choice to do nothing about it, and it seems very clear that our loss of traffic is related to our deluge of 'toxic' backlinks. About a month after I uploaded disavow files for certain sites, we're already noticing our traffic trending back upwards. We have had some sites that have lost over 95% of traffic, literally over a couple of days. Google may say they don't penalize sites with a lot of crappy links, but traffic analytics tells a much different story. That being said, I don't want to argue about whether or not disavowing these toxic links is futile or not. I'm just looking for insights from others who have had a similar situation and might be able to offer hard-won advice. I'll be sure to return the favor to the next guy, when the time comes.

tangor

1:19 am on Aug 5, 2023 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Do these toxic links ever get a 200 response from your server? If not, don't worry about them. Show an exemplified sample of these toxic links, please. You might just be seeing a blizzard of phish/hack attempts that SHOULD result in 404 if not 403.

G deprecated their disavow tool quite some time back, so any relief you are currently seeing is g beginning to clean up the crud from their side, not yours.