Is this link spam? How can we stop it?

[greenfiend]

I recently noticed a bump in referring domains on our site and went to check them out on AHREFS only to discover these particular set of domains all linking to one of our target pages. They are content links on really badly written articles using anchor texts not at all related to the pages they link to. That's when I noticed a handful of other competitors of my industry with links to their practice pages also with incorrect anchor texts.

Now I've seen this happen before with blogspot pages, but this one's new. These set of links appear to have been first seen only a few months ago. Are they just link spam and we should safely ignore them? Or can they be an indication of malicious intent? Is there a way to prevent them from happening?

 

[celina]

Good catch! It's great to see backlink profiles monitored like this.

This is just link spam and you can safely ignore those backlinks. No need to worry about any disavow or clean-up. Google will devalue those backlinks if they haven't already. In a few months, I'm sure they will end up disappearing from AHREFS reports as those domains will soon be expired.

One of your competitors is probably engaged in a low-quality link strategy. They will build backlinks with non-relevant anchors with thin/poor content, Then they include a bunch of backlinks to their client and their competitors to try and trick Google into thinking these backlinks are"natural". Luckily for us, Google has evolved and has algorithm's in place to devalue or filter out these backlinks when it comes to the value of your website. In my experience, I haven't seen these backlinks harm a website or cause a manual penalty requiring more effort.

Unfortunately, anyone can include a backlink to your site so there is no way to prevent it from happening, however, this is why it's important to monitor your backlink profiles and pay attention to new and lost backlinks so you can be aware of things like this.

I hope this helps!

 

[greenfiend]

Thank you, celina! I appreciate your insight into this issue and I'm relieved to know I shouldn't worry over it.