What does a Backlink to temporary email website mean?

Should i be worried about temporary email linking to me

[LoriCor]

Hi all, I am new to SEO and am just learning the basics. Over the past month, I've been trying to gradually build up some quality links. White hat only as I don't see the point in buying subscribers or conducting any black hat activity cos at the end of the day you are just buying yourself statistics that might look good initially but will probably come back to bite you when you're not making any real conversions. I'm more interested in finding people who are interested in my website and products than the numbers showing in analytics.

So with that in mind, my question is to do with the fact that today I found a backlink from my website pointing to a temporary email website. when I followed it I could see an email address had been generated but it said underneath that "ERROR 404: Message not found We keep your email's active up to 24 hours. Please be aware! xxx - is a temporary email service and we don't keep your email's forever.".

I had not known there was such a thing as a temporary email generator. so does anyone know

what occurred here that it ended up linking back to my website?

Is this kind of website known to harm SEO efforts?

Is there anything I should be doing about it?

If anyone can shed some light on this I'd be really grateful.

[graeme_p]

If you are talking about a link found from logs or traffic then it probably just means some emailed a link to your website.

Its very likely these are not crawled (as there will be no incoming links and they are only up briefly), and may be blocked in robots.txt or in the page meta.

[not2easy]

Or it could be a scammy marketing effort by this "temporary email service and we don't keep your email's forever" provider. Much depends on how you came across this 'backlink'.

[LoriCor]

The website that you can create temporary emails was found in the list of sites linking to me in google search console (i'd post it but not sure if it's wise to be giving its URL any publicity here). This concerns me a bit as I don't get why someone felt the need to create an anonymous email address that has ended up backlinking this website to me, seems a bit strange that's all

[not2easy]

OK, there are always going to be automated links from sites that use scraping and scripts. I would not be too concerned about that one as they may have only hoped to get your visit by creating that "not found" link. Google will clean those kinds of links out of the GSC without any action on your part. It may take a little time but on examination they can see it for what it is, whether it was actually a link shared in an email or a marketing effort. Sometimes I've seen thousands of links and the domain no longer exists by the time it is found in GSC.

BTW LoriCor - welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

And yes, we'd prefer that no links are posted in discussions. ;)

[LoriCor]

Ok thanks for that, makes me feel better. :)

It's my first website and I'm putting a lot of effort into building it and learning and implementing SEO so when I saw that it was just after I'd been reading an article on what google bans and penalizes sites for. So I guess finding that link panicked me a little. I'd hate to get a slap on the wrist by Google for something I didn't do! But I guess I will just wait and see if it disappears.

Thanks for the reply, and the welcome! :)

[lucy24]

found in the list of sites linking to me in google search console

Ah ha. You will learn, over time, that at least 90% of what GSC tells you can safely be ignored. In particular, I ignore everything at the top of the “links to you” list, since this includes other people’s sites that have been hacked, links and all. I find the most interesting information at the bottom of the list. (If I link to Obscure Blogs A and B because only they had the information I was looking for, why shouldn’t Obscure Blogs C and D link to me on similar grounds?)

[tangor]

@LoriCor ... grand fun ... and WELCOME TO WEBMASTERWORLD!

Interesting queries generate comments out the wahzoo. :)