Disavow this kind of (thousands) links is a good idea?

[LightMan]

Hi to everyone,
we have noticed that GSC shows new thousands of spam links like this:

rxwidget.com
widgetvip.ru
stripwidget.tel
widgettube.fan

Is a good idea, disavow all of them ?
We dont cover this kind of niche and contents...seems to be an artificial backlinking.

Thanks to all.

[edited by: goodroi at 8:40 pm (utc) on Mar 27, 2019]
[edit reason] widgetized [/edit]

[goodroi]

Google tends to do a very good job at spotting and ignoring bad links without any help from webmasters. Most websites would be better served if they focused their efforts on developing good links and worry less about cleaning up bad links.

[tangor]

Never bothered to play with the disavow tool. Seems pretty useless effort. After all, the noise is on g's side, not mine.

[lucy24]

GSC shows new thousands of spam links like this

And if you look more closely--which frankly I do not recommend, because sometimes ignorance really is bliss--you’ll find that they all use horrible trashy linking text. There was a recent thread [webmasterworld.com] about it. It happens to absolutely all sites, and the general reaction is to ignore it and it will go away.

...

...

Come to think of it, this is the general reaction to at least 95% of things we discover in GSC. It’s the other 5% you need to concentrate on.

[tangor]

^^^Exactly!

[dennisjensen]

Google would probably say to ignore those, they seem spammy. I do use the disavow tool, though. There are bad links like #*$! and various scams among them, just to make sure, I disavow those. Ain't a lot, but it makes me feel better.

[LightMan]

Thanks guys for the advice. ignoring has always been our choice!

But yesterday I found something quite strange.

Only yesterday in the server log of Yesterday I found 250,000 google bot (googlebot mobile) accesses via url "/search? Q = [KOREAN CHARACTERS]". are all URLs that end in 404 pages.

With AHREFS we have found links from domains like this : foxgirlwidget.co.kr, aspwidget.com.br, korean etc.etc.
This thing seems to have started in February.

The thing that scares me is that google loses time on these URLs rather than working on our site.
if I exclude the 250 thousand visits from referer spam, the work on my site is made by 30 thousand calls (the site has 3 million pages and is updated daily).

should I ignore these too?
seeing that google is crawling where it shouldn't?

Thanks


(Mods note: No actual domain names, please. The serps indicate some of these may have been hacked. I've anonymized specifics)

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:21 am (utc) on Apr 13, 2019]
[edit reason] Anonymized domain names.... [/edit]

[not2easy]

If you are reviewing your logs you can separate out the actual "googlebot" visits/requests from those that merely say they are googlebot. Are the visits all from legitimate Google IPs? And what is the server response? Bots programmed to fill your logs with referer spam can be blocked. Those that only show up in GA reports can be blocked. You first need to know the difference, and then determine your best methods to deal with it. It quite likely is not actual traffic, nor from Google.

The thing that scares me is that google loses time on these URLs rather than working on our site.

I can understand that you would prefer that Google was crawling actual pages on your site than bogus "links" they find, but the links may not even exist and you may be losing more time on them than Google is.

Do a search here for "referer spam" or "block referrer spam" - this comes up frequently.

[LightMan]

Unfortunately on GA don't see these visits, there are only on log files.

IPs cames from google DA, they are like this series 66.xxx.xxx.xxx and 46.xxx.xxx.xxx. SemRush confirm that are googlebot.
The user-agent is this : "Mozilla/5.0+(Linux;+Android+6.0.1;+Nexus+5X+Build/MMB29P)....m/bot.html)"

I will try to search the forum as you suggested, but i don't know if will be a good idea block the path "/search" with robots.txt and forgetting the rest.

[not2easy]

I did not suggest that you use robots.txt to block Googlebot from crawling "/search". That is up to you.

That UA is not Googlebot.

"66.xxx.xxx.xxx" is not all Googlebot, only a limited part of 66.249.xxx.xxx is Googlebot.

I am not aware that Google crawls from IP 46.xxx.xxx.xxx and I would want to see at least the b. and c. before I would believe it.

[LightMan]

The ip are like this : 66.249.76.XXX and 46.229.168.XXX....very strange.
if they were few, I wouldn't worry...

I tried for a day with the robots and in fact they disappeared (to understand if it was Google). we hope to finish soon

[not2easy]

The 46.229.168.XXX. is Semrushbot: [webmasterworld.com...] which is known to ignore robots.txt as many other robots do. You can't really deal with blocking bot activity using robots.txt because only compliant robots read and follow it.

[tangor]

@LighMan ... spend some time reviewing posts at [webmasterworld.com...] for dealing with bad actors. Most times this is addressed in .htaccess