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I'm quite baffled by this issue and I have absolutely no idea who could be causing it. I have a normal PHP page and we are optimizing it for a few keywords. We have been doing general SEO activities for the last four months and so far we have built around 350 external links. I checked my Google Webmaster Tools (Google Search Console) yesterday and suddenly got 2000 links inbound from a single “edu” domain. We don’t have any idea how those links came the very next day, and we never touched that domain during any of our SEO activity. Upon further investigation I found that there are tons of sites listed there just like ours. As you can see, the following page of ours is linked to from a Chinese university domain

http://www.mindarraysystems.com/network-monitoring-software-tools.php

My question is what are my options now, should I submit these links to Google's disavow tool? I have already sent a few emails to try to remove these links but it seems it’s a huge university website and I don’t think we will be able to reach the right person with this issue. Will Google count my website as spam since I got too many links too quickly from one single domain?

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Should you use the disavow tool?

Google's Matt Cutts says that you should only disavow links if you are seeing problems such as drops in ranking that could be due to the Penguin algorithm, or if you have received an "unnatural links" notification from Google through webmaster tools.

Will lots of links from a single domain hurt?

Not necessarily. Lots of sites get get some of these types of links. I wouldn't worry about just one domain linking to you like this. If the anchor text that they are using is not keyword rich, it almost certainly won't be a problem.

How about the other 350 external links?

The other 350 external links that you managed to build in one month sound far more worrying to me. That is a lot of links for a short time period. Those links are very likely to get your penalized if they are in any way spammy:

  • Appear to be paid
  • Use keyword rich anchor text
  • Are hidden or in sections of the page that are not prominent (sidebars and footers)
  • Come from sites that are not relevant
  • You don't continue to build links at the same rate in the future

I certainly hope you did your homework when you started a link building campaign and know about the risks. You need to be familiar with "Penguin" and have read everthing you can find that Google has said about web spam.

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  • Thanks Stephen for detailed answer. I have build 350 links in last four month and we are building all links manually but do you think this is still bit high? Yes we did see a pattern of drops in keywords current rank. but this started about a week ago.
    – Mohitpatel
    Apr 5, 2013 at 10:54
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    350 is not a lot at all... Id rather be concerned about the quality of these links than how many.... 1 good quality link could out power all 350 of those and pose little risk.
    – Simon Hayter
    Apr 5, 2013 at 12:11
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When your domain get some many backlink from unknown source, you domain may got penalize and you may lost your keyword rank and domain.

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  • Is this what ended up happening after you asked this question?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Mar 18, 2019 at 11:23

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