I've discovered what looks like a negative SEO campaign in the form of a link to my website being just dumped into the middle of some text about dating Asian women and other unsavoury web pages. BTW these are all invisible pages on legit websites that are all WordPress sites so I suspect there's some hack out there that enables people to add their own pages to other people's WordPress sites without being detected by the owner. Maybe someone in here has heard about that?
Anyway, I updated my disavow list but my question is this:
On the Google Search Console disavow page, when I select my domain property it states that "Domain properties are not supported at this time." So, I have a choice of four versions of my website: HTTP and HTTPS and with and without www. So, my question is: which one do I upload the disavow list to? I have been using the https://www one. Is that the one to use or do I have to upload the disavow list to all four each time?
1 Answers
Best Answer
Just to clear up that one link does not, ever, make up a 'Negative SEO campaign'. Dodgy sites often use scrapers that insert random legitimate content, and random legitimate links, in the belief this will somehow make their pages look more 'natural' to Google. These will not have an adverse effect on you unless that were literally the ONLY external link to your site (because then Google would know for sure it wasn't scraped but affiliated).
It is common for sites to pick up many links from unsavoury sources, and the more legitimate links to the site, or the more prominent the site, the greater the chance of any such link occurring is. So high value sites may have millions of such links, and moderate value sites may have thousands of them. None of them having any overall effect.
If a disavow makes you feel happier, and you'd otherwise lose effectiveness worrying, then by all means do a disavow, but understand that it is completely unnecessary, and the time could certainly have been spent more productively.
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