Blackhat attempts vs my site - disavow or ignore?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Over the past few days I've had the pleasure of finding

- thousands of links pointing to my site that render 404 errors because the pages don't exist
- hundreds of links pointing to my sites junk pages(login, privacy, profiles) that have noindex tags
- my content on this spam domain which features adult content and my images hotlinked on the same pages
- links on the spam site pointing to other spam sites, all doing the same
- links pointing to pages with variations in my urls
- other stuff I'm sure I missed.

Now, I do have canonical tags in place and seem to be handling each incoming link properly and it *looks* like this is having no effect on my site right now, even my images are still in google images, but it is disconcerting a little. If they were to boost the pagerank to the spam site it might become a problem, theoretically.

Is this where the disavow tool might be useful or would you ignore it? I haven't used the disavow tool yet, I'm not sure what to really expect from it.

[Rosalind]

thousands of links pointing to my site that render 404 errors because the pages don't exist

I've noticed this, although not in the thousands, and for me it's recent. It's my understanding that it's easy for search engines to look at a site that mostly points to 404s and label it junk, so for now I'm just keeping an eye on it.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I'm hoping Google labels that junk but the links seem to be "almost" right for the most part.

example.com/real-article-url <--- exists
example.com/real-article-url-now <--- what they are linking to.

It's a default in wordpress to redirect the later to the right one, you have to add some htaccess rules to stop wordpress from redirecting, otherwise I'd have 1000's of redirects instead of 404's.

[linkbuildr]

I had a decently new site with buddypress that got spammed to death via fake users and then the links. After a few months of earning links with content and social interaction, I'm still doing fine even though I have whacky anchor text numbers and way more junk links.

Site has been climbing up and up with nothing but constant good content and the links it earns.

[jimbeetle]

Is this where the disavow tool might be useful or would you ignore it?

Google came out with the disavow tool as a way for webmasters to clean up the unnatural links they built themselves. Google is always insistent that it ably handles those junk links that are all over the place. I don't worry about those types of links, however, your mileage may vary.

[mslina2002]

I don't worry about those links either, though they are not in the thousands like yours.

Whenever I get a 404 error from an incorrect back link pointing to my site, I mark them as "fixed". It goes away. If they were in the thousands I would definitely not hesitate to use the disavow tool to kill off the pesky scums.