I'm Getting BAD Links

[Sally Stitts]

In my new GSC, under "Top Linking Sites", I get -

somebullcrap.ir --- 4,025 (This is NOT NATURAL - How do I get rid of this Iran bullcrap?)
wordpress.com --- 2,855
blogspot.com ---- 1,315
yahoo.com -------- 889
yellowpages.com - 650

If I disavow somebullcrap.ir, will this fix me up? EVEN if I get link juice from this, it is OBVIOUSLY FAKE, DEVIOUS, and UNWANTED!
Please help. I don't know what I should do. I have not had anything like this happen in 14 years.

ALSO, if I search on Google for super-bogus-url.com, my site is NUMBER ONE! I don't like this either.
Just who might be screwing me over on THIS deal?
Thank you.
.

[fretfull]

Something similar happened to me a few months ago. It's called negative SEO. There are companies that specialize in it. Basically someone put out a hit on your site. It messed me up quite a bit. What can you do? Tell me if you find out. Since I haven't found much that can be done. I tried contacting Google. It was not easy to get a response at all. I finally did and the initial response seemed to be hopeful. They said sure they would deal with it if it was fake. They would need time to research it though. That was months ago. I've tried pinging them a couple of times and I get the same give us some time to research it response.

Check your .htaccess to make sure you haven't been hacked. If you have, then the bad guys can put in some rewrites that serve pages and meta to search engines that's completely different from what your site shows. So you would never know going to your site directly but all the search engines will see "super-bogus-url.com" when indexing your site.

In the end the only thing I could do was change my meta data and titles. That seems to have stemmed the damage at least.

The crazy part about all this is that I got an email from someone saying they were the people that were hired to hit my site. They wanted to know if I wanted to pay them to hit the person that hired them back. They had enough little details in their proposal to convince me that it was them that hit me.

[JesterMagic]

Just disavow it to be on the safe side. Google is suppose to detect this type of obvious negative SEO.

[lucy24]

Use GSC's own tools to look at a thumbnail of somecrap.tld. Does it look familiar? I see it most often when a site containing links to me (nofollow, I assume, as it's WP, but never bothered to check) gets hacked and they don't bother to change any of the content. If so, the owner of the real site may appreciate the heads-up, whether or not they can do anything about it.

Remember that “who links to you” in GSC doesn’t distinguish between followed and nofollowed links. It's just a machine.

[ClosedForLunch]

Remember that “who links to you” in GSC doesn’t distinguish between followed and nofollowed links

Also, from my own experience, some external links to your site as reported in GSC may not actually exist anymore.

[tangor]

Remember that “who links to you” in GSC doesn’t distinguish between followed and nofollowed links. It's just a machine.

And one that is dealing with billions and billions of same each day and MIGHT be getting close to overwhelmed. :)

The bad actors will not quit ... and neither should you.

[Sally Stitts]

@fretfull - Just one line in my htaccess file, the way I left it - a custom 404 page.

@Lucy - Lots of pages, all in an arabic-type script - google translate says Persian-to-English - farsi?
The Google Search command site:somebullcrap.ir returns 16,000 results.

I am not a programmer, just a little self-taught html 4.01.

I looked up the site in whois, and I got the guy's name. Googled it, and I see he is currently hawking himself as an extremely knowledgeable "can do anything online" sales pitch.
I emailed him at "[e-mail] - He has not responded.
ADDED Wednesday - I also emailed him at "[e-mail]" (whois email contact).

Since I am a non-software person, I need some help.
If a real programmer wants this info for research, you can PM me for it. He has a large online presence, which makes him appear legitimate. So why is he doing this to me (neg SEO)? I wonder when I will get the email from him to fix it for money?

Any takers? I work d@mned hard on my site, and I don't appreciate this nefarious nonsense.
Thank you.
.
Here is the redacted email I sent -

Hi xxxxxx,

Why am I getting over 4,000 links from you at xxxxxxxxxxx.ir?
I only get 2,800 from wordpress.com
Am I somehow getting “worked over” by you, or perhaps an associate?

I am not a software person, but this does not look right to me.
I bet it doesn’t look right to Google either.

Must I engage my Google contact to make these links go away? And do some other things, disavowal, report, etc., etc.?
I work hard on my site, and I don’t think I am being helped by a bazillion spurious links from Iran.

Thank you for your attention to this issue.

Sincerely,
Me, webmaster at htttps://mysite

[fretfull]

It might be an good idea to at least add "Options -Indexes" so that people can't look at your directories. It might not be set to be defaulted to that in the server config. Many webhosting services default to being pretty wide open and leave it to each person running a site to lock things down.

It also may be a good idea to run a basic security audit to see if there are any well known security issues.

To add on to my experience with negative SEO. Since the incident, I get about 5 emails a day from SEO companies asking if I need their help. Before the incident, I got maybe 1-2 a year. I must now be on the you've been hit, do you need help with that mailing list.