Technical foundations
Spam links pointed at your site, found by hand and dealt with carefully.
Sometimes thousands of junk websites start linking to a business out of nowhere, from a competitor, a spam network or an old bad decision coming back. Most of the time Google ignores them. Sometimes it does not. The job is telling which case you are in, and acting only as far as the evidence goes.
What negative SEO looks like
The usual pattern is a sudden flood of links from sites nobody would visit: gambling and adult sites, auto-generated blogs, pages in languages you do not trade in, forums stuffed with links, directories that exist only to link. Often they use odd anchor text, sometimes words that have nothing to do with your business, sometimes aggressive commercial phrases designed to look manipulative.
Some of it is deliberate, aimed at making your site look like it bought links. Some of it is simply the background noise of spam networks that link to everything. Either way, the first sign is often not the links themselves but what they seem to cause: rankings sliding for no reason you can find, or Google appearing to misunderstand what the business is.
What Google says about it
Google is clear that it handles most of this without help. In its guidance on disavowing links it says that in most cases Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most sites will not need to use the disavow tool.
It also says when the tool is appropriate: when you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links pointing to your site, and the links have caused a manual action, or likely will cause one. And it warns that disavowing is an advanced feature to be used with caution, because used incorrectly it can harm your site's performance in Google Search. Both halves of that matter. Doing nothing is usually right. Doing it carelessly can make things worse.
How to look at your own links
Open the Links report
In Search Console, go to Links, then Top linking sites. This is the list Google itself has seen, which matters more than any tool's estimate.
Export and sort
Export the full list and sort it by the number of links. Spam networks tend to cluster: dozens of similar domains, each with a handful of links.
Look at the names
Domains made of random strings, unrelated foreign-language sites, and names that mention gambling, loans or adult content are the obvious first group to check.
Check the dates in a link tool
A tool that records when links were first seen shows whether they arrived gradually over years or in a burst. A burst is the pattern worth worrying about.
Open a few
Visit a handful from each group. A real business or publication that mentions you is worth keeping, even if a tool scores it low.
A Manchester cleaning firm hit on purpose
Exclusive Pro Cleaning was hit by a negative campaign: thousands of spam websites pointed at it on purpose. Google appeared to be holding them against it, and had the business filed as an Airbnb cleaner when it is a commercial, residential, carpet and end of tenancy firm. Every spam link was found and formally disowned with Google, and the rest of the site was rebuilt around a silo per service and real town pages.
Across June to August 2026, the firm averaged position 6 for "house cleaner manchester" in Search Console, which is page one. The cleanup was not the only work, and I would not claim it alone moved the ranking. It removed a source of doubt so the rest of the work could land.
On a Las Vegas law firm's site, thousands of spam links were also found by hand and disowned, alongside the merging of overlapping posts, while its refused pages fell from 4,144 to 2,549 by 3 September 2026.
How the cleanup runs
Collect every linking domain
From Search Console's links report, which shows what Google itself has seen, and from a link index such as Ahrefs for a wider view. Exported, merged and deduplicated by domain.
Read them, not just score them
Tool spam scores are a starting point, not a verdict. Domains are reviewed by hand in groups: is this a real site a person would visit, does the link make sense, is it part of a pattern. Good links that happen to score badly are kept.
Find the pattern
When did the links arrive, from what kind of site, with what anchor text. A spike of thousands in a few weeks from one type of network reads very differently from years of low-grade background noise.
Decide whether to act at all
If there is no manual action and no sign the links are doing harm, the honest answer can be to leave them and watch. If there is a manual action, or a clear and considerable pattern, a disavow file is prepared.
Build the file carefully
Whole domains for obvious spam networks, single addresses only where a mixed site has a few bad pages. Commented with dates and reasons, so anyone can see why each line exists. Kept as a living document, not uploaded once and forgotten.
Watch what happens
Google says it can take a few weeks for a disavow list to be incorporated, as it recrawls the web and reprocesses the pages it sees. Results are read over weeks, and new spam is checked for monthly while an attack is ongoing.
Mistakes that make it worse
Disavowing everything with a low score
Tools mark many harmless links as risky. Disavowing them throws away links that may have been helping, which is exactly the harm Google warns about.
Uploading a file nobody can read
A disavow file with thousands of lines and no comments cannot be reviewed or safely edited later. Every group should say what it is and why.
Replacing a good file with a new one
Google's own help says that uploading a new list for a property will replace any existing list. A new file that forgets the old entries silently undoes earlier work.
Treating it as the whole fix
Spam links are rarely the only problem. A site with thin, overlapping pages and a confused structure will not recover just because the links are disowned.
Panicking and deleting pages
Links point at pages; deleting the pages does not remove the links and throws away whatever those pages had earned.
If you have a manual action
A manual action for unnatural links appears in Search Console under Manual Actions, and names the problem. That case is different: the links have already been judged against you. The work is to remove what can be removed at source, disavow what cannot, document both, and then file a reconsideration request that explains honestly what happened and what was done. Google reviews the request; there is no guaranteed timeline or outcome, and the request is stronger for being specific and truthful.
If the Manual Actions report is empty, you do not have a penalty, whatever your rankings are doing, and the case for disavowing rests on the pattern of links alone.
Links worth keeping
Most of your links are fine, including some that look odd. Local newspapers, trade bodies, suppliers, customers' own sites, directories you chose to be on and old partners all belong, even when they are small or rarely updated. The cleanup protects these by name, so the disavow file only ever carries what is genuinely spam.
What you receive
The full list of linking domains with a decision on each, the disavow file if one was needed with every line commented, a short written account of the pattern found and what was done about it, and a monthly check for new spam while the risk continues. All of it kept in your portal, so the next person to work on the site does not start from zero or undo the work by accident.
Questions about spam links
Can a competitor really hurt my site with spam links
Google says it can usually tell which links to trust and ignores the rest. In practice most attacks do little. Some, especially against smaller sites, appear to cause real damage, which is when careful cleanup is worth doing.
Should I disavow links just in case
No. Google says most sites will not need the tool, and that using it incorrectly can harm performance. Act on evidence, not worry.
How long before a disavow works
Google has to recrawl the linking pages first, which takes weeks and sometimes longer for obscure sites. Judge it over months, not days.
Can you remove the links themselves
Sometimes, by contacting the site owner, but spam sites rarely respond. The disavow file exists for exactly the links that cannot be removed at source.
Will the attack stop
Sometimes it continues. That is why new links are checked monthly while it does, and the file is kept up to date.
Seeing links you did not ask for?
Send me the site. I will look at the links, tell you whether they are likely doing harm, and whether anything should be done at all.