Triage
Analyze backlinks for spam: triage before any disavow file
Thousands of junk links appeared overnight. Before you upload anything, work out whether they are hurting you at all.
Myth versus reality
| Myth | Reality |
|---|---|
| Every low-DR link is toxic | Most junk links are simply ignored. Google said so for years, and SpamBrain, announced in December 2022, was built partly to neutralise link spam automatically. |
| A competitor can sink you with cheap links | Penguin 4.0 in September 2016 moved the algorithm to devaluing spam rather than punishing the target. Rare cases exist, so monitor, but panic is rarely warranted. |
| Disavowing improves rankings | Google introduced the tool in October 2012 for unnatural-link problems and manual actions. If you have neither, it usually changes nothing. |
| Removing a link cannot hurt | If a sitewide network was quietly propping you up, cleaning it can lower traffic. Measure before and after, one batch at a time. |
| A scoring tool's toxic label is a verdict | It is a heuristic. Third-party toxicity scores often disagree, so treat them as a queue for human review. |
Start with the question that decides everything
Do you have a manual action? Open Search Console and read the Manual actions report. If it is empty, disavow is almost certainly not your problem.
Many people spend a weekend building a file when the real cause is a traffic drop from a core update. The links were there for years and the drop began last Tuesday.
Analyze backlinks only after you have ruled out that story. Compare two referring-domain snapshots, such as September and October, and see whether the junk arrived before the drop or long after it.
Red flags worth a second look
- Dozens of domains with identical templates, the same footer text and the same anchor pointing at one page of yours.
- Anchors with money terms or pharma, casino or adult keywords on a site that has nothing to do with them.
- A sudden batch from one hosting range or one network, all created within a few days.
- Links from pages that exist only to hold links: no navigation, no readers, no other outbound topics.
- Anchors you never asked for pointing at pages you never promoted, which often means scraper copies rather than an attack.
Decision tree, in words
- 1
Manual action present?
Yes: remove what you can, disavow the rest, document everything, and file the reconsideration request. No: continue.
- 2
Did traffic fall within two weeks of the junk arriving?
No: log the links and stop. Yes: check your own site changes first, then continue.
- 3
Are the links paid, or part of a network you bought from?
Yes: those are yours to answer for. Ask the seller to remove them, and disavow only what stays. No: they are probably someone else's noise.
- 4
Is the volume still growing?
A steady trickle of thousands is common for popular sites and is mostly scraper behaviour. Review monthly, not daily.
- 5
Disavow, narrowly
Use
domain:lines for whole sites, keep a comment per batch, and record the date. Then wait for a recrawl before judging anything.
Pull the evidence in one call
Anchors are the quickest spam tell. This returns the anchor texts for your domain, 2 credits whatever the row count, so you can scan for patterns.
curl -s "https://rankift.com/api.php?action=anchors&q=yourdomain.com&per=1000&key=$RANKIFT_KEY" | head -c 3000Our index is refreshed about once a month, so a spam burst from last week may not be visible yet. Search Console's links report and your server logs are fresher. For a deeper manual audit, a full suite such as Ahrefs or Semrush shows more history.
What to log, so the next review is short
Keep one line per batch: date seen, number of domains, anchor pattern, your decision and the reason. Revisit it in a month.
If traffic later moves, you can say what you knew and when. Also link the log to your lost links runbook so removals and arrivals live in the same sheet.