Mentioned on Spammy Sites but no links... Should I do anything?

[labatt]

Hi all -

Some company seems to have hired an idiot linkbuilder who is creating hundreds of articles on what look like random blog networks. The articles are fractured junk content taken from real websites and piecemealed together as an article rich in keywords. Unfortunately, this junk content has all been lifted from a couple of sites and mention our company name. There is no link to our company - just our company name mentioned 1-3 times per article across hundreds of articles. There is always one link that goes to the same company. I'm sure they'll get a manual action at some point.

Is this something I should worry about? Even though there are no links to our site, our name is mentioned across all of these sites. Even without the links, should I still disavow every one I find?

Thanks!

[JesterMagic]

Since there is no links the disavow tool is not the thing to use.

If they have plagiarized enough of your content you can reach out to them warning to take it down. Also reach out to their host as well. For some sites this could become a full time job with the amount of scraping that happens.

In my case I may only do this if there content ranks in within a page or 2 of my content. Google is pretty good at catching this now though and it has been a few years since it has happened.

I also tend just to report them to Google and get them to remove my content from the other site from their search results.

[support.google.com...]

I find this is the best solution though the Google Reporting tool requires you to do one page at a time which is a real pain if the site has copied more than a few pages of your content.

[labatt]

Thanks. Just to be clear - the content on the pages was not taken from our site and it's all gibberish. Real words, but excerpts of phrases from various web pages. But a few of those excerpts just happen to have our company name in them. I'm just concerned that Google might pick that up as a secondary signal of some sort and it will cause issues for our actual site.

[Nosuchthing]

Hello,

I would advise not to worry about it. I've seen it happen over and over, with and without links in the past, and never saw any repercussion.

It does not take much time for Google to identify that this is not a legitimate website. Most of the time, they hardly ever manage to drive any traffic, and disappear pretty quickly.

Even when they link to you, Google's advise is pretty much to do nothing. A site that popped out of nowhere with 10K+ outgoing links and hardly any incoming is raising enough red flags by itself.