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Please consider the following image, from Google Webmaster Tools

enter image description here

I have these unnaturally high link counts coming in from lowish Page Rank Domains (MOZ Score 13)

Is this natural? Is this hurting my site? Is this an indication of someone trying to bring my SEO rankings down?

The green circle is from a friendly competitor (which is natural hench green), the other two I dont know

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  • 2
    It would help to know what domains are linking to your site. At least the two in your example. – closetnoc Jun 26 '16 at 5:32
  • Could be scraped content or a competitor, as closetnoc said, links would be advantagous for more info. If a domain links to 10 pages on your site, but those links are on every page of their own site. If the linking site has 100 pages, that’s 1,000 “links” to 10 “linked pages.” – user20874 Jun 26 '16 at 6:52
  • I would be careful about disavowing links from sites. That option is for only really really really bad cases. With 575 and 250 do not come up to that standard in my book. – closetnoc Jun 27 '16 at 2:28
  • This can be quite common (We have this on most our larger clients), best thing to do is check the anchor text and referring domain, if both are terrible consider disallowing that particular domain. – Switchfire Jun 28 '16 at 10:12
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+50

Without knowing the domains linking to your website and indeed your own domain, it is impossible to be 100% certain of what nature and reason those domains have a number of links pointing to a page on your website but there is not necessarily any cause for alarm or concern.

Firstly metric-wise, don't worry that a domain has a low Moz domain authority that is linking to you, DA is based on authority passed through linkage so if a website is relatively new or for whatever reason, does not have that many external links pointing to it, it does not mean that it is spammy or should not be trusted or can cause harm.

There are many possible instances that could lead to a sitewide link pointing to one of your pages, or multiple links from a domain pointing to one of your pages. When you have multiple links coming from the same domain to the same page on your own website, the sitewide/multiple nature diminishes the links anyhow to something roughly equivalent to just one link from that domain to your page being counted/paid attention to.

Something to note, there is nothing (or at least, very little) you can detect as "unnatural" in Google Search Console as it is quite a basic tool that only touches the surface of website behaviour.

If you want to check for any malicious activity in relation to your website and external linkage, ensure that you don't have an abnormally high count of unnatural and spammy looking exact match keyword anchors pointing building to your website. This will be the quickest way a competitor can win with negative SEO against you.

Hope that helps - of course, we could provide more information knowing the domains in question censored in your screenshot.

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  • 1
    A well reasoned and thought out answer. Of course! Cheers!! – closetnoc Jun 28 '16 at 23:07
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Please take a look at this image: enter image description here

Most of these are links from my clients, but also from some web-catalogues that automatically adds links to your site. I do not think that is a bad situation and you should be worried.

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  • This does not answer the question but merely shows that you have sitewide links pointing to one page of your website and that, in your case, is nothing to worry about. – zigojacko Jun 29 '16 at 7:22
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No the links are not natural. Now days many spam websites try to link other website to get attention from the users. It is the new technique spammers are using to drive traffic. You can use Google disavow tool to ban these sites. After submitting the sites in disavow tool, Google will not consider these links as backlinks. This will avoid any penalty from Google.

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  • This answer hits the mark - it appears that these pages have a very high link density and don't appear natural. I would disavow them too, just to be safe. The comment above about them being scraped content is likely on the money too - sites like SEOcamel try to get attention by copying your stuff. – L Martin Jun 26 '16 at 10:50
  • Both this answer and the first comment is inaccurate and impossible to know from the original question. One thing I would definitely advise against is even touching the disavow tool without knowing what you are doing and following the advice of blindly disavowing domains is certainly not what it is for nor recommended! – zigojacko Jun 27 '16 at 12:25
  • How can you possibly say these are spam without even having a look at the links? – pro_ng Jul 1 '16 at 11:34
  • If you closely check the image of the webmaster shown in the question by @Marilee , these sites are giving many links to the site. The image shows someone added the website in the footer or side bar section. If it is share by genuine user then he will not link the page in the footer or side wide link. It is completely against the guideline of the Google. – Prashant Gorule Jul 9 '16 at 9:06
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  1. Have you received any message from Google in your Search Console (Webmaster Tools) notifying of a Manual Review penalty?

  2. Have you checked these domains and confirmed if your link is an open link (not nofollowed) or a nofollowed link?

If the links are not nofollow'ed then there is a fair chance of them being the culprit and it's better to get rid of them or disavow them.

However, if the links are nofollow'ed, then the reason would be something else.

What kind of link building practices have you adopted so far?

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The external links if any would help your site rather than harm it in any way.

Consider a competitor who is placing your links on its site, its ultimately giving you the traffic back and these back links also help you bring your seo up.

These are the direct links from some sites to your sites, i would rather consider them as gifts and accept them.

If these would have been a spider attack, some competitor trying to crawl my site up heavily, i would have dome something to stop that. But if any site is promoting my content by adding my site's html links, i would be grateful to accept that :-)

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  • This is not necessarily true. Links can harm a website if they are unnatural and/or spammy whether for the benefit of attempting SEO or attacked by negative SEO. – zigojacko Jun 29 '16 at 7:21
  • It used to be true till the time Penguin came into the picture. Now links to your site can and WILL harm it whether the links are being developed by you or your competitor – pro_ng Jul 1 '16 at 11:35

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