Domain with spam links is redirecting to an internal page of my site

[achromatic]

I operate a site of the form brand-widgets.tld and recently I noticed a lot of 404s appearing in GWT. When I investigated the source of the 404s I discovered that they were all for pages that never existed on my site. Moreover, they all were listed as "linked from" different-name-widget.tld

When I visited different-name-widget.tld I discovered that it 301 redirected to my site. In fact, it didn't just 301 redirect to my home page, but it redirected to an internal page. Namely,

different-name-widget.tld/ >> brand-widgets.tld/category/ (301 redirect)
different-name-widget.tld/random-page.php >> brand-widgets.tld/category/random-page.php (301 redirect)

So, the base url of the other domain is being 301 redirected to a category page of my site. This also explains all the 404s in GWT because those pages may once have existed on the other domain but obviously don't exist on my site.

Even after figuring out all this, I thought it was possible this might have been done by mistake, but then searching around, I found that there were quite a few recent spam links to different-name-widget.tld (more recent than the first 404 error from the redirect in GWT).

Going back to GWT, I found that a couple of these spam links are appearing in my list of backlinks with the "via this intermediate link" note (and the intermediate link is different-name-widgets.tld). Not all of the spam links have appeared in GWT tools as yet.

Anyway, I'm a bit worried now. I am fairly sure this an attempt at negative SEO (though I have no idea why, the niche is not competitive). Should I use the disavow tool preemptively and add in different-name-widget.tld as well as all the spam links pointing to it that I can find? Is there anything else I can should/do?

I would appreciate any help/advice. Thanks!

[netmeg]

I get a ton of these. Doesn't seem to be a negative SEO thing as much as a scraper thing; I've found several dozen domains on .org and .net TLDs that are doing this with millions of pages at a time. Are the sites running ads?

I haven't done any disavowing, and so far it doesn't seem to have any negative effect on my stuff. It's pretty obvious, and so far anyway, Google seems to be figuring out that whatever it is, it's not me doing it.

If the sites are running AdSense, you can always try reporting em for that.

[achromatic]

Thanks for the reply!

The site redirects to mine, so there isn't any content on their domain at the moment. My first thought was that they were planning on keeping the redirect long enough to gain rankings for their domain, then they would remove the redirect and put up a page with ads. I hope this is the case because Google does seem to do a pretty good job with scrapers.

If they're redirecting all traffic to my domain, I don't see any benefit for them, which is what makes me suspicious (both Googlebot and regular visitors are redirected). I wouldn't be as worried if I could see an obvious benefit in them doing what they're doing.

Is there a point at which I should be worried (e.g. if the redirect is still in place in 6 months)?

[netmeg]

Can you tell if you are getting much traffic from it? Are these other sites indexed in Google at all?

It is kind of weird to be totally redirected to your site.

I don't suppose it would hurt to disavow it. I'm not sure it's necessary, but it wouldn't hurt.

[glakes]

Chances are it's a passive negative seo attack. Instead of just disabling churn and burn domains, these guys are moving to new domains and redirecting them to unsuspecting victims.

Disavow the domain in WMT and block the domain in htaccess. That's about all the defense you have. I'm not sure about what netmeg said about reporting the site to adsense. If the pages are 301'ed to your site, no adsense would be displayed on their pages to report.

[achromatic]

Thanks for the replies!

@netmeg: Looking back at analytics I see 4 visitors who received 404's trying to visit a URL that presumably existed on the other domain at one time. So essentially no traffic is coming via the other domain.

The other domain can be found with a site:different-name-widget.tld search in google. There is only one result and that is their homepage/root but the content that appears (title, description) is of my category page (the one they redirect to). When clicked it goes to my category page because of the redirect.

@glakes: Makes sense. At least it doesn't appear to be a very active attack thus far. I noticed a few relatively recent spam links when search around, but not hundreds.

It sounds like I should just go ahead and add different-name-widget.tld to the disavow tool because at the very least it won't hurt me. Is it worth adding any of the links pointing to different-name-widget.tld?

Thanks again for the help!

[not2easy]

I have also seen this kind of thing (8+ years ago) when someone is using your deep page as their listed "landing page" so the AdsBot gives QS based on the destination page, but traffic clicking ads never goes there, they get 301 redirects to a merchant site. Not saying that is what is happening in your case, but some of the details sound familiar. Redirects being done on a domain with no content other than UA/referrer redirects via headers. If Google's Bots are the only ones getting redirected to your site, that would explain the title/description similarity also.

When I had that affecting my site I started blocking the AdsBot-Google in my robots.txt across all my domains. Since I don't run any PPC campaigns, that bot does not need to see anything on my sites.