Disavowing domains, subdomains, sites w/ same hosting?

[radarroy]

I have a question about disavowing links.

Over the past month or so I suspect that someone has been hitting my site with negative SEO and most of these links have been coming from sites hosted on the same servers.

And 90% of these links are sub-domains of another domain, example

Site1.Spamdomain.com

So my questions are:

1: If I disavow the main domain, would that also disavow the sub-domain?
2: If I download all the sites on this server (all are spammy sites) would there be any problem in adding them to my disavow file?

[tangor]

Disavow is your option. If you need do it nuke at highest level first... if that doesn't work then granular down until it finally does. I don't know of any hard and fast rules in this regard.

[radarroy]

Thanks Tangor

[Robert Charlton]

I'm assuming that certain kinds of domains probably can't be disavowed. In the case of large domains like blogspot, eg, where the subdomain is in fact the site, you probably need to disavow the subdomain itself. (If that's not the case, btw, it would be interesting to know.)

I'd otherwise do what tangor suggests about starting at the highest level first, but I don't think I'd wait around to see if that works. If there's a large identifiable subdomain that you want to disavow, go ahead and do it.

Ditto, if you don't like all the sites on a server, disavow them by domain, since you can't disavow by IP or by IP range.

[tangor]

If there's a large identifiable subdomain that you want to disavow, go ahead and do it.

This is the usual and normal way to do it... yet it should be noted that often nuking a "bad neighborhood" can take care of far more.

These days, the way the web is, I tend to shoot first and count the causalities later. All too often bitter fruit from the tree means cut down the whole forest.

[radarroy]

One of the weird things I am noticing from all these spammy links on the same server is when I go to the link(s) says that the site is inaccessible because of bandwidth overages

Anyone have thoughts on this?

[Robert Charlton]

...thoughts on this?

They sound like low rent sites on no frills hosting. Hard to say how Google would treat inaccessible backlinks, btw... whether this would speed up the disavow or delay it.

To add an extra thought regarding these sites all on the same server, hosting in common is one of the signs that Google uses in determining if sites are related. You'll see that link disavow tools will group sites by IP, among other classifications... to determine if the link sources are perhaps closely related to the destination sites ("same Class C IP" is the rule of thumb), and also to determine if the link sources are related to each other. You don't want links from groups of closely related sites in any case. Google might take both situations as signs of coordination.

Also, I think you can safely assume that all the sites that are inaccessible on this server are part of the same operation. I think you have the right idea in getting rid of them all.

[fathom]

What is a spammy link?

If your keywords evolve around widgets and someone anchors links with some type of widget phrase that would indeed be spammy.

But everything else is a nature link, low quality maybe (low PageRank) but those are not spammy.

[Robert Charlton]

But everything else is a nature link, low quality maybe (low PageRank) but those are not spammy.

I'm glad I didn't use the word in this thread, fathom, but I well might have.

Let's say that with spammy links there's weakness in numbers. ;)

Google looks at patterns, so yes, you can't really have a pattern with one link... and Google's historical data patent suggests that Google looks for "spiky" behavior, signs of coordination (among many links) that are just too coordinated to be "natural".

[fathom]

You don't even need to disavow blogspot ... You just need to contact the owner (Google) a very simple process. That tool was never meant to replace link removal or editing links with rel="NOFOLLOW". It was meant for when you cannot get the former done.

As for the "patterns" what does Google do with that understanding... In theory, it devalues it.

What precise patterns does Google devalue?

[radarroy]

Thank you all for your feedback as far as the "questionable" links coming from these sites they are in mass and they have started showing up in my GWT backlink profile about a month ago. And many of these links have started appearing with dates to indicate that Google is able to read the links even when I attempt to go to the site(s) and get the message that the site is inaccessible because of bandwidth limitations. The sites are hosted with hostgattor if this helps

[fathom]

Unless these links are anchored with YOUR keywords or scraped content from your website with your own URLs included they will never harm you.

At worse, be of no help to you and at best, provide some PageRank.

[radarroy]

Thanks Fathom however this is the problem, every time I attempt to go to any of the sites I am denied access because the server says exceeded bandwidth so I cannot see if the pages were scraped and/or if they are using my keywords :-(

[aristotle]

Have you tried to find these suspicious pages in Google's search results? You can search for the specific URLs and see if Google has them in its results. If not, it could mean that Google has intentionally excluded them from its index. If it does show them in its results, you might be able to look at recent caches of the pages to see exactly what's on them or was on them.

Also, note that many spammy links are auto-generated and frequently only exist for a short time, then disappear on their own.

[fathom]

Question: can Googlebot fetch? If it cannot you have no worries.

A URL still archive does not imply anything is passed. If Googlebot cannot crawl a URL it is quite liberal to maintaining that URL for a long period of time (upwards a year) which suggests GSC will also maintain the reference long after it is dead.

[fathom]

I only mention this stuff, because an ACTUAL NATURAL LINK is one where you have no exacting knowledge about... which seems to be the same criteria novice use to determine if they should disavow... That is categorically the wrong premise to determine what needs to be disavowed.

That tool is an advanced feature, and comes with a major caution:

This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have 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. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool.

ONLY IF YOU BELIEVE... if you didn't create them how can you possibly BELIEVE ANYTHING WITH ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY!

...and Matt Cutts starts this video off saying "YOU MESSED UP..."

[m.youtube.com...]

Suggesting you purposely created those links and the primary rational for this tool. We can all dance a jig around all the vague references about being worried, scared, terrified, but if these conditions exist for you... You are the wrong person to be playing with this tool.

[radarroy]

Well the Google Cache worked and they are all links URL links to the home page of my money site. These are roofing, camera, apartment and who knows what else, just tons of them...
:-(

[fathom]

Well the Google Cache worked and they are all links URL links to the home page of my money site. These are roofing, camera, apartment and who knows what else, just tons of them...

Unless the link anchors are those topics and your homepage is also referencing those topics that would be your only concern. Ignore these if otherwise.

[radarroy]

Well to better explain it the link is www.example.com
So no need to worry?

[edited by: aakk9999 at 6:45 pm (utc) on Oct 2, 2015]
[edit reason] Replaced mywebsite with example [/edit]

[Walt Hartwell]

I've seen links from sites that sound close to what OP reports.
A common structure will be PersonNameTradeName.PersonNameTradeName2.tld/numbers/folders/pages
No capitals in the actual URI, tld is usually com with some nets.
There are usually limited PersonNameTradeName2,tld domains, but many variations of the PersonNameTradeName subdomains, numbers, folders and pages.

If a person wanted to disavow, the most efficient way would be domain:PersonNameTradeName2.tld
As stated previously, that should take care of the subdomains, folders and pages along with the main domain.

One issue with these domains is the scraping of Google serps for their content. They will take perhaps the top 20 serps for a given keyword set, use those serps(links) as the page content, then use the keyword set for folder or page names. It could quite easily look to an algorithm like intentional promotion.

I personally don't believe it is negative seo, the links from those sites appear like camouflage for the "sunglasses" links at the bottom of the pages. There might be other keywords, I've only seen brand name sunglasses.

[Kratos]

If it helps, it is a common thing for spammers to point links to "other" sites to make it more difficult for Google to detect the un-naturalness of a hacked site about autism linking to a pharmacy site. They will add links to other sites with the belief that Google will be fooled (which actually works to an extent from what I see every day including that hacked autism site).

Also it is a big thing for spammers to use expired domains and point a link to your site if you're not a direct competitor. We get these all the time. Again it follows the thinking pattern of "hey Google, I'm not just linking to my stupid affiliate site but also to other sites related so if you want to penalize my site you will have to penalize the other innocents". Just have a look on black hat forums to see this. It's gotten so bad that we easily have dozens of PBN links, thing is we didn't ask for them and they're "natural" as far as we are concerned. Unfortunately Google will use the same brush to paint everyone in a link scheme.

Unless they're pointing related anchor text links to your site I would not be worried. Unfortunately (again) spammers link using anchor text to innocent sites as they believe that using anchor text, even if to link to another site, increases the relevance and context of the page and the link pointing to their BH site.

I just hope that Google is aware of this issue, which they probably are but have no way to detect which link is the bad one and which one has been placed to try to fool the bot.

[Walt Hartwell]

I suppose I wasn't clear enough in my explanation.
Sites using the format provided are scraping Google serps for their content. That means they will take the first ten or twenty results from Google and repackage it as their page content. Highly targeted anchor text to your site if you happen to be in that top ten or twenty. They then place links for their money keyphrases elsewhere in those pages.

Hacked sites and PBN drive by links are just part of normal background noise and probably do not need to be addressed..

[fathom]

Sites using the format provided are scraping Google serps for their content. That means they will take the first ten or twenty results from Google and repackage it as their page content. Highly targeted anchor text to your site if you happen to be in that top ten or twenty.They then place links for their money keyphrases elsewhere in those pages.

I don't see how that applies... You generally CAN'T do NEGATIVE SEO & MONETIZE A MONEY SITE AT THE SAME TIME. Or rather, you'd be a moron to point out who is earning income from this so the attorney knows who PRECISELY TO SUE OR TO SEEK OUT AND DEMAND A SETTLEMENT.

Tossing out anonymity defeats the value of "NO ONE KNOWS NOT EVEN GOOGLE!"

[Walt Hartwell]

@fathom,
I had stated earlier I did not believe this is negative SEO, it looks like camouflage for their own links. The problem with the camouflage is that it consists of highly targeted anchor text because it is lifted from the serps.

I did a quick tally of the latest 100 links to a site where I see this happening:
4 good links from reputable sources.
9 links from what looks like injected WordPress sites.
5 links from sites that look like wannabe Search Engines and seem MFA
1 dead site
81 links from domains with the format previously described

It might be easier to think of it as potential collateral damage from someone else's desire to sell products. Disavow seems like the prudent choice.

[fathom]

The only harmful links are the ones unnaturally helpful to you.

Someone's camouflage isn't going to induce ranks for you... no matter how much wishful thinking you apply.

So while you can obsess over links that do absolutely nothing for you wasting time on this fruitless activity is just being under-productive.

[radarroy]

Wow, lots of feedback on this topic and I thank everyone for their feedback. Over the weekend we discovered another 1,000 links from sites on this server and for some strange reason they are using anchor tags that have no relationship to my business such as "Mike's Plumbing Repair Phoenix" or "Joe's Heating and Cooling". So I suspect as some posters have suggested that they are attempting to camouflage the other links on their site by using mine. Irregardless I have all the domain names that are hosted on this server and disavowed them all, along with the subdomains that many of the links are coming in. Thus far GWT count is over 50,000 back links from the domains on this server.

[Walt Hartwell]

So while you can obsess over links that do absolutely nothing for you wasting time on this fruitless activity is just being under-productive.

I stated I thought those links were not negative SEO and just a byproduct of someone else's SEO efforts.
That's hardly obsessive, although I did spend about 5 minutes today adding a domain to that disavow list.

I actually agree with most of what you post regarding links, this is just an unusual approach others are taking for SEO and I think it is best to distance oneself from their work. Better safe than sorry kind of thing.

[tangor]

Any one besides me tested this "disavow" thing by doing NOTHING?

Six sites hit (with clients going crazy) with 100k hinky links each (or a tad more), all that work, listing, naming, clicking dead, etc. Disavow, disavow, disavow! (I got paid)

and

Six sites, hit hard, combined with over half million links. Did nothing.

Guess which ones thrived and managed to do business and had no additional expense (time and labor, and salary)?

The LAST thing I want to do is Google's job. If they need that much help (disavow) then there's something really wrong with the "black box". :)

There is a certain amount of FUD I will listen to. When it becomes ludicrous I have other things to do.

[Hoople]

...thoughts on this?

They sound like low rent sites on no frills hosting.

I agree with Robert - time to move out! Depending on the preponderance of spammyness from this singular host the urgency may be moderate to immediate.

As another suggested a imperceptibly small boost 'could' be gained by a less overloaded host. This would be a combination of a speed 'reward' from g00gle and/or a slight reduction in bounce rate...from more users sticking around as your site loads faster.

[SuperT]

Hi, new here. This very thing is happening to my site. I'm finding a ton of inbound links via Search Console and ahrefs from domains where I can't even access the page. It says "Bandwidth Maximum Exceeded" every single time. The sites seem irrelevant to mine - some a bit, some very irrelevant. site: search shows no results but in Bing it does. Going to the site doesn't render though - same error. But if I view the cache, I can indeed see the page.

I know DA may be relative but some of these have decent DA. Should I be proactively disavowing these? I haven't been hit with a manual penalty, I didn't build these links. Then again, I don't know if any previous SEO folks that worked on this site did.

As for penguin, it's hard to gauge, I believe we were hit by a small panda refresh but it was near the same time a penguin update hit. We haven't bounced back yet and I'm starting to suspect that it might have to do with penguin too, thus the dive into the backlinks.

Is the recommendation to disavow those domains? Can I post examples here?

Thanks, all.