Black hat linking to images?

[westcoast]

I am used to getting attacked by black hat SEO attacks -- I've got 30,000 domains identified with spammy / black-hat attack link crap to my site. This has been happening for 2 decades.

But I noticed something new recently... suddenly I'm seeing a massive number of domains (approx 10,000! ) spamming -- claiming to be organized by some entity called "Creativo" -- with links to images on my site, and nothing else. No text links at all. The are doing this to tons of other sites too... a page with maybe 10 images from other websites and seemingly nothing else. Weird.

I'm wondering (a) what are these spammers attempting to do? and (b) can my site be damaged through spammy toxic crud pointed to IMAGES on my site?

Interested in thoughts...

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I seen this too. The alt text they use is the entire content of my page sometimes. It occasionaly shows up as the anchor text of image only backlinks in Search Console.

<FilesMatch "\.(jpg|png|gif|webp)$">
Header append X-Robots-Tag "noindex"
</FilesMatch>

Afterwards the spammers can do as they wish and pound sand.

Bonus: Google will stop snipping your web traffic by showing one of your images in the image box of regular SERPs and canibalizing it with the image result.

Web traffic > Image traffic anyway. It takes a lot more image impressions to get the same amount of traffic from G and it doesn't perform as well as web (text) results., imo.

YMMV

[edited by: Sgt_Kickaxe at 7:40 pm (utc) on Oct 5, 2022]

[lucy24]

Overlapping:

You forgot one piece of information. When there is a hotlink to an image on your site, what does the requester--whether human, robot or search-engine crawler--see?

In the specific case of G###, image requests are pretty evenly divided between Googlebot-Image and the ordinary Googlebot, where the latter always comes with referer. That means it is in G###'s power to know how a site handles hotlinks. (Whether they actually do know is a different question. Someone hereabouts will be able to shed light.)

[christianz]

@westcoast

I have about 10k domains of those if not more also. They may be taking images adding some text and hoping to rank on image search. I can't think of anything else.

I see others that backlink on hacked org and edu sites to me with word soup and dofollow links to my pages. Those look far more like negative SEO attack than these tons and tons of image backlinks.

[westcoast]

"I see others that backlink on hacked org and edu sites to me with word soup and dofollow links to my pages. Those look far more like negative SEO attack than these tons and tons of image backlinks."

These spammy/do-follow backlinks spiked massively last year for me too. AHREFS shows my site's link profile tripling mid-2021. Since then my site has dropped *like a rock*. 30,000 new backlink *domains* (hundreds of thousands of spammy/link farm looking backlinks) that ahrefs/semrush have picked up... so the real number is likely significantly more.

Even if Google has a 98% spam-ignoring / detection rate, it is attributing THOUSANDS of spammy backlinks to my site. This is how we're being penalized from this garbage. There is so incredibly much of it that even if Google fails to detect it even a tiny fraction of the time, we get destroyed.

My site remains in a freefall since this blackhat attack that keeps on going today. I had held off from using a disavow since we don't have a manual action, but given our site's freefall it's kitchen sink time.

My big concern now is what to do once we hit the 100,000 disavowed domain limit. The 30,000 + 20,000 older ones I had marked is halfway there, and if I add the other 10K image spam backlinks we're well on the way to 100K.

This is just totally stupid. My site's suspicious link to real link ratio is off the charts, and not a single one is our fault. There is *no way* that Google is fairly ranking us based on our 25 year old, black-hat decimated, spammed, link profile.

[engine]

I'm wondering (a) what are these spammers attempting to do? and (b) can my site be damaged through spammy toxic crud pointed to IMAGES on my site?

It's experimentation, and proof of concept likely to be sold on. Unless your sites are specifically targeted for abuse, there is no care for your business.

They do it because they can, sadly.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Try a removal of the image folder on your site for 6 months? See if traffic from web improves.

The value of image search is likely to go the way of the dodo once AI images proliferate. Why would you need to see thousands of images when you can enter a line of text and make your own masterpiece.

[engine]

Try a removal of the image folder on your site for 6 months? See if traffic from web improves.

Or, if you need the images, give it a new address to fool the scammers, for a while.
It's all about experimentation.

[Dimitri]

Google Image Bot, should set the referer field, this would give the control to publishers , over the indexing of images. Index them when they are displayed on our sites, and ignore hotlinking , for example.

[lucy24]

Google Image Bot should set the referer field

That's the difference between ImageBot and GoogleBot. If they both did the same thing, there wouldn't be any point in using both.

[Dimitri]

To me, there is no point of having different crawlers. It's just a matter of download a resource.

[phranque]

Google Image Bot, should set the referer field, ..

not all user agents fetch using the same process as browsers do.
Image Bot has a list of image URLs to crawl.
each of those URLs may have been referred to from thousands of pages.

[lucy24]

each of those URLs may have been referred to from thousands of pages

And that--one would hope--is why the Googlebot, unlike the ImageBot, sends a referer. Most of the time, unless you've been hideously unlucky, the referer is the appropriate page on your own site. But sometimes it isn't. (I checked this in logs before posting last week.) One way, the requester gets the image; the other way, they may or may not.

And I don't think OP ever clarified how their site handles hotlinks.

[Nutterum]

A very nasty Negative SEO Image attack bomb is through blogspot sites. Not sure what Google is doing there but the auto-generated spam is insane out there and can be scaled to infinity with enough cash.

[christianz]

A very nasty Negative SEO Image attack bomb is through blogspot sites. Not sure what Google is doing there but the auto-generated spam is insane out there and can be scaled to infinity with enough cash.

Do you have some evidence suggesting these are done explicitly for negative SEO or are they just acting as negative SEO as side effect or are they having no effect at all?

[Nutterum]

@christianz - first time it was encountered was accidental spam that affected the website in a very negative way. A colleague found out automated content generation scripts used and link to 50-ish images to his website. The effect was devastating as these bots spammed over 30k links in a week. It took him 4 months to recover and it was not at 100% . The second time I have seen this, it was done with malicious intent as the image link bombs were used on images unrelated to the content on the spam sites, making matters worse. Because blogspot is Google's property their spam bots are not flagging such links and deem them "proper" thus the negative SEO attack worked.