One SEO professional asked John Mueller about spammy backlinks during a hangout.
Their question was: what can they do if they have thousands of spammy links that were continuously placed as bad backlinks on malicious domains?
They contain spammy keywords and cause 404s on their domain. They saw a strong correlation between these spammy links and a penalty they got after a spam update in 2021.
They disavowed all the spammy links, and they reported the domain, which is listed as a source of links spam.
What else can they do?
John answered that he agrees that this can be very frustrating. There are two things he thinks that are important to mention, in this particular case.
On one hand, if these links are pointing to pages on your website that are returning 404s: So they’re essentially linking to pages that don’t exist, therefore Google won’t take those links into account.
Because there’s nothing to associate them with on your website.
Essentially, people are linking to a missing location. So when Google comes across them, they ask “how can we deal with this link?” If Google can’t connect it to anything, then they’ll drop it.
So this is the first part that–a lot of those links are probably already dropped.
The second part is, they mentioned they disavowed those spammy backlinks. Especially if you mentioned that these are from a handful of domains, then you can do that with a domain entry in the disavow backlinks tool.
That essentially takes them out of their system also.
Google will still list them in Search Console. And you may still find them there and be a bit confused about that.
But they don’t have any effect at all.
If they’re being disavowed, then it tells Google that links should not be taken into account – neither in a positive or negative way.
This happens at approximately the 20:54 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 20:54
Let’s see–a bunch of questions here: What can we do if we have thousands of spammy links that are continuously placed as black–backlinks on malicious domains? They contain spammy keywords and cause 404s on our domain. We see a strong correlation between these spammy links and a penalty that we got after a spam update in 2021. We disavowed all the spammy links, and we reported the domain, which is listed as a source of the links spam. What else can we do?
John (Answer) 21:25
Yeah, I think this is always super frustrating. As a site owner, when you look at it, you’re like, someone else is ruining my chances in the search results. But there are two things I think that are important to mention, in this particular case. On the one hand, if these links are pointing to pages on your website that are returning 404. So they’re essentially linking to pages that don’t exist, then we don’t take those links into account.
Because there’s nothing to associate them with on your website. Essentially, people are linking to a missing location. And then we’ll say, like, what can we do with this link, we can’t connect it to anything, so we will drop it. So that’s kind of the first part, like a lot of those are probably already dropped. The second part is you mentioned you disavowed those spammy backlinks. And especially if you mentioned that these are from a handful of domains, then you can do that with a domain entry in the disavow backlinks tool.
And that essentially takes them out of our system as well. So we will still list them in Search Console. And you might still find them there and kind of be a bit confused about that. But essentially, they don’t have any effect at all. If they’re being disavowed, then we tell our systems that these should not be taken into account, neither in a positive nor negative way. So from a practical point of view, both from the 404 side and from the disavow, probably those links are not doing anything negative to your website.
And if you’re seeing kind of significant changes with regards to your website in search, I would not focus on those links, but rather kind of look further. And that could be within your own website, kind of to understand a little bit better, what is actually the value that you’re providing there. What can you do to really stand up above all of the other websites with regards to kind of the awesome value that you’re providing users?
How can you make that as clear as possible to search engines? That’s kind of the direction I would take there. So do not lose too much time on those spammy backlinks, you can just disavow the whole domain that they’re coming from, and then move on, there’s absolutely nothing that you need to do there. And especially if they’re already 404 pages–linking to 404 pages, they’re already kind of ignored.
