What's the latest (2022) view with regards to disavowing .xyz links

[KieranThomas]

I've noticed an increasing volume of spammy links from .xyz domains for a few of our sites (See an example below). Most aren't even in English so are also a different language to what our client's site's typically support.

Interestingly, each domain typically only has 1 link, but across the sites many share exactly the same meta.

According to Google, we shouldn't need to disavow them as:

We recommend that you only disavow backlinks if you believe that there are a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you.

So based on that, I'd be included to leave them.

However, I'm a little curious as to what everyone else is doing as whilst Neil Patel also quotes the above text in the following article, he also goes on to list what to do to remove individual links (i.e. not links where there are a "considerable number" which have slipped through the net):

https://neilpatel.com/blog/google-disavow-tool-seo/

Just curious what others are doing.

Thanks

 

[djbaxter]

I would block the .xyz URLs globally (*.xyz - move to spam) and individually spam block the rest.

 

[KieranThomas]

Hi @djbaxter

Thanks for your reply. Have you successfully used Wildcard in a disavow file?
I've not used it before, but I was under the impression it wasn't supported (see: Is it possible to dissavow all links from a top level domain (like .xyz)? for example)

Also, what's your view on disavowing low quality directory sites such as https://rankwebdirectory.com/website-list-no-1352/

Personally I've always just left them as my understanding was Google would just ignore them, but I'm wondering if that's still best practice, or whether I should disavow those too given they have no real value.

Thanks

 

[djbaxter]

I obviously ignored / skipped past the thread title - sorry. I've been under the weather this past week.

I wasn't talking about disavowing links but blocking the bot from the site.

Since bad bots will almost certainly ignore robots.txt, that won't work but you can use .htaccess to block specific bots. They never get to your forum so they can't post links or anything else.

But I guess this is off-topic for this thread. Again, my apologies.

 

[KieranThomas]

"MU"?

 

[KieranThomas]

Some more examples - this time with high spam scores too in Moz.

Disavow, or assume Google is auto-ignoring them?

 

[localseosecrets]

Don't spend your time with disavowing "toxic" links.

If you are saying that those links could damage you, so you are saying that Negative SEO is still effective which is not true.

Google is smart to figure out that for you.