Why are spam sites linking to me? ("Get higher rankings with…" and other junk links)

When I scanned my own travel site, castizospain.com, DR Buddy found 43 sites linking to it.

A handful were real. A blog post about the Camino. A travel guide that mentioned one of my towns.

The rest were strange. Sites I'd never heard of, with anchor text like "Get Higher Rankings with" pointing at my homepage. I never asked for those. I've never even visited those sites.

If you've seen the same thing, here's what's going on.

Where these links come from

Most of them are automated pages that exist for every domain on the internet.

Think "what is this website worth" calculators, SEO audit pages, "sites similar to" lists, whois lookups and domain-stats sites. They crawl huge lists of domains and build a page for each one. Your site gets a page because it exists, not because anyone chose it.

Those pages usually include a link back to the site they're describing. And the text around that link comes from a template. That's why the anchor text makes no sense. "Get higher rankings with" is just the start of a sentence the template forgot to finish, or a sales line for the stats site's own tool.

Scraper sites do the same thing. They copy content from around the web, including other pages that mention you, and republish it with the links intact.

So the short version: a machine made the link. Nobody is targeting you.

Does it hurt your site?

No. Here's why I'm confident about that.

Google knows these sites exist. They've been around for twenty years, and every website on the internet has some. When Google rolled out its December 2022 link spam update, it said its spam system, SpamBrain, was being used to "neutralize the impact of unnatural links." Elsewhere in the same announcement, it says its algorithms aim to nullify unnatural links at scale.

In plain words: Google doesn't count these links for you, and it doesn't count them against you. They're noise.

If junk links could sink a site, anyone could take down a competitor by pointing a few thousand of them at it. Google has spent a long time making sure that doesn't work.

So what should you do?

Honestly, nothing.

Don't email the site owners. There usually isn't one, or they won't answer.

Don't panic about a "toxic score" from an SEO tool. That number comes from the tool, not from Google. Some tools have a reason to make it sound scary.

And you almost certainly don't need Google's disavow tool. Google's own help page says most sites will never need it. I explain when it does make sense in Should you disavow backlinks?

What DR Buddy does with them

When you run a backlink scan, DR Buddy sorts every linking site into three groups: worth monitoring, not sure and probably junk.

Stats sites, valuation sites, sites with very high spam scores and tiny sites with hundreds of links to you go into Probably junk. That section starts folded away, because you don't need to look at it.

If you want a clean list, click Ignore all. Ignored sites stay hidden after future scans too, and you can restore any of them if you change your mind.

Then spend your time on the short list that matters: the real sites that link to you from inside an article. Those are the links worth monitoring.

When a junk link is worth a second look

There's one exception. If a link uses your exact money keyword as the anchor text, and you or someone you paid built it, that's a different story. That's not random noise. That's a link scheme, and it's the kind of thing Google's spam policies are written about.

If that's you, read the disavow guide. If it's not, and the anchor text is nonsense like "Get higher rankings with," you can stop worrying about it.