New domains instantly being link spammed. What's the remedy?

[JS_Harris]

Several weeks ago I set up three different websites from registration to launch(family members want to show off some artwork). Today I did a quick check to make sure the indexing process was going well and found that all three domains have been bombarded by spammy incoming links.

3000-4000 incoming links point to the index pages of each site, each from a different domain that had been registered for six months or so and is as of today a dropped domain. The incoming links were there from day one of launch and stayed active long enough for search engines and several metrics SEO companies to record them.

As you know a newly launched domain doesn't have any authority to defend against this type of link spam and it's a kick in the rankings groin so to speak. How do you go about cleaning up the spammy backlink effects right off the bat if the sites are already gone? How much of an effect do you suspect they had?

[jmccormac]

What kind of spammy backlinks? Were they from blogs or at index page level? At a guess, you may have registered a domain that was part of a spam network by accident.

Regards...jmcc

[adder]

Yeah, I think @jmccormac might be right. If you go to: whois.domaintools.com/example.com, if the number of drops is not zero, you've got a dropped domain that can potentially carry load of issues.

[Planet13]

I just think that someone is getting registration for new domain names directly (don't know how exactly, but guessing someone is publishing it), and they are just blasting new domains.

[JesterMagic]

I agree with Planet13. I have thousands of spammers backlinks that change every month. There is not much you can do about it and Google's disavow tool is pretty useless in dealing with this (or anything else but I won't start a rant now :-)

Check your logs you probably also have spammer bots visiting your page trying to login and post comments.

[turbocharged]

The problem is that spamware reports where it has submitted to. If you operate a blog, forum or any site that allows user content you should do your best to remove footprints (ie. powered by wordpress, vbulletin, etc.). This makes it harder for spammers to find you.

Use captcha where you can, but try to use Solve Media or at the very least ReCaptcha. OCR software is unfortunately cracking easy captchas, which are no longer a major hurdle for spammers.

The goal is to reduce the successful submissions that these spammers are getting - even if you don't approve them. Moderating spam comments is no longer good enough - you must take aggressive steps to get the spam under control. If you can successfully hide from spammers, it may allow you enough time to get a handle on disavowing those bad links. If you don't want to take a tough stand to stop spam, like some clients I know of, you will find little time to create content because you are spending a significant amount of time scrutinizing each and every new link that points to your site.

Good luck!