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I have a website that shows up in the google search console under URL inspection with a referring page that is another website entirely. I did a reindex a couple of days ago and it was last crawled on the 21st October, but the referring site has not changed.

The referring site is dodgy and I don't want to visit the site or try and contact the owner to have them remove the link to my website. Is there a way to have google not show this dodgy site as being the referring page?

Google also reports a Top Error and Redirect Error. Don't know if that error has something to do with the dodgy referral site.

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  • It's possible to disavow links in Google, but Google is smart enough to ignore most of them. It's likely to disappear in a few weeks. I would not worry about it. However, if it's that important to remove, look up how to disavow links.
    – Trebor
    Commented Oct 24, 2021 at 4:36
  • Does this answer your question? How to identify spammy domains giving backlinks to my site (to submit in disavow links in WMT)
    – Trebor
    Commented Oct 24, 2021 at 4:39
  • Hi, I keep getting emails from the google search console team saying a coverage issue is detected.
    – Ford
    Commented Oct 24, 2021 at 4:44
  • @Ford These sound like separate issues - can you edit the question to include screenshots for each and quote the text from the email regarding the coverage issue detected? That will help us to better answer the question. We often get questions here regarding referring page - see this related question and Google's Help doc on removals.
    – dan ♦
    Commented Oct 24, 2021 at 7:25

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Google usually sees many links into any particular page. However it only shows one example as the referring page in Google Search Console. It seems to pick a referring page randomly. It isn't a problem that the example that it picks is dodgy. The dodgy referrer isn't likely to be hurting your site. I would just recommend ignoring it. At some point Google will randomly update to show a different referrer.

Other errors in Google Search Console are not likely to be related to this referrer. There is not enough information in your question to help you with those, so it is hard to say with 100% certainty, but I would be very surprised if a referrer could cause redirect errors.

Somebody in the comments suggested disavowing the link. I wouldn't recommend doing that. Doing so could hurt your site's rankings. Google says that you should only disavow links if you have a manual penalty for spammy links or if you see a ranking drop that you can attribute to spammy links. Disavowing when there is no such severe problem can cause google to ignore links that are propping up your rankings.

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