Suddenly Dozens of Spam Backlinks: My Live Case Study

On June 2 my Ahrefs alert popped up: new referring domains. The next day again. And again. Within six days there were over 60 new spam backlinks, and they all looked the same: welldone***.net, economy***.com, carters***.com, viva***.com. A tree service, a glazier, a courier, a beauty salon. What do they have to do with a German SEO blog? Exactly. Nothing.

When this happens, most people panic and google “how to remove spam backlinks”. My first question is a different one: does this even hurt? Because the honest truth about negative SEO in 2026 is inconvenient for everyone who makes money off disavow panic.

I will walk you through a real case: my domain, my Ahrefs data, my Search Console numbers. You see exactly what came in, whether it moved my rankings and what I actually did about it. Spoiler: very little – for good reason.

Facts first, interpretation second. I pulled the full referring-domains export from Ahrefs and broke it down by first-seen date. For months my backlink growth sat at roughly one new domain per day. Then this:

The wave from June 2 is impossible to miss – and it accelerated: from a handful per day to 23 on June 6 and 35 on June 7. Around 70 of these new domains were flagged as spam, all nofollow, all with terrible Domain Rating. And above all: all from completely unrelated industries. Here is a slice of what came in:

Slice of around 70 spam domains from the wave (June 2 to 7, 2026). All nofollow, Domain Rating consistently low.

This matches typical patterns of a spam bot network. Some bot added my domain to a list and is now scattering it automatically across hacked or auto-generated pages – typically WordPress comments, spam profiles or empty directory pages. You are not in the crosshairs of a competitor here, you are on an automated scrape list. Which leaves the question that actually matters: does this junk even hurt me?

Instead of speculating, I look at the data. I pulled my Search Console for the period covering the wave and plotted daily clicks plus average position. The red line marks the start of the spam wave on June 2.

The picture is clear. Before the wave my clicks averaged around 37 per day, position about 9.8. During the wave: around 46 clicks, position 9.3. Impressions in those same days even climbed from roughly 16,000 to over 18,000. In other words: exactly when the spam hit, things ticked up rather than down. The biggest chunk of the wave actually came afterwards, on June 6 and 7 with over 30 new spam domains per day – and the position held at around 9 to 10 even then.

Is that proof that spam links never hurt? No, that would be an overreach. It is proof that this wave – nofollow, low DR, off-topic – did no measurable damage. And that lines up precisely with what Google officially states.

Here is the mechanism you need to understand. According to Google’s document “Spam Policies for Google Web Search”, Google detects policy violations “both through automated systems and, as needed, human review”. Link spam is a category there – creating links whose main purpose is to manipulate rankings.

The crucial part is devaluation rather than penalty. With the Penguin algorithm, which has run in real time since 2016, Google increasingly ignores suspicious links instead of penalizing the linked page. John Mueller of Google has repeatedly emphasized that you usually do not need to do anything about spammy backlinks because Google mostly ignores them anyway – Search Engine Journal sums this up too. Google’s link-spam efforts are also backed by the AI system SpamBrain, which according to Google is meant to detect manipulative patterns (Google does not disclose exactly how it works). For you that means: if a bot randomly throws spam links at your domain, per current data this usually does not lead to a penalty of the target page.

My assessment: per current data and Google’s own statements, pure link-spam attacks show no measurable effect in most cases – though exceptions are not ruled out, for example large-scale dofollow campaigns with manipulative anchors and an actual ranking drop. With nofollow junk from random sites, nothing measurable happened in my case.

If you want to understand more deeply how Google evaluates such signals algorithmically, I broke down the mechanics behind the spam systems in the Google Spam Update March 2026.

Now the practical part. Google’s own help page is titled “Disavow links to your site” and is unambiguous: the tool is an “advanced feature” to be used “with caution”. It literally states that Google can in most cases judge which links to trust on its own, “so most sites will not need to use this tool”.

Disavow is, per Google, only appropriate when both are true: you have “a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links” and they cause “a manual action, or likely will cause a manual action”. That is a high bar, and my random spam does not clear it.

A practical detail in case it ever does come to that: it is officially documented that you can devalue an entire domain at once via the domain: directive. That the same mechanism also applies to a whole TLD is something John Mueller mentioned in 2026 as a one-off remark – but it is not explicitly part of Google’s official documentation and should be treated with caution. A disavow file is plain text, one domain per line:

# comment explaining the reason
domain:spamdomain1.com
domain:spamdomain2.net

But – and this is the point – in my case the spam scatters across many different TLDs (.com, .net, .it, .work, .lt), no single pattern dominates. So there would not even be a convenient TLD shortcut. And above all the precondition is missing: there is no manual action.

So my concrete approach was: open Search Console, look under “Security & Manual Actions” – it says “No issues detected”. That settles it for me. No disavow, no emails to webmasters, no busywork.

If the same thing is happening to you, work through this order. It is exactly what I did:

1. Check manual actions. Open Search Console, “Security & Manual Actions”. If it says “No issues detected”, the most important question is already answered. Only a real action for unnatural links makes disavow a topic at all.
2. Cross-check performance. Look at the last two weeks in the performance report. No drop in clicks or position = no real effect. Exactly what my curve above shows.
3. Classify the character of the links. Nofollow, low DR, off-topic random sites? Then it is bot spam you do not need to care about. Only a surge of dofollow links with hard money keywords in the anchor text would be a warning sign.

For ongoing monitoring an alert on new referring domains is enough – in Ahrefs, Semrush or a similar tool. If you want to dig more precisely in Search Console, my RegEx copy templates for GSC include a few useful filters. And if you want to work on building a clean link profile rather than just fending off spam, my guide to building backlinks for small domains is the better lever. Whether a single link is worth anything at all is something I tested with the Grokipedia backlink case study.

My case is exemplary: over 60 spam links in six days, all nofollow, all off-topic – and no measurable negative effect in my GSC data. Google is good at automatically devaluing that kind of junk in 2026. The tool warnings are a useful early signal, but not a call to action.

The most expensive mistake on this topic is not doing too little, but doing too much: a premature disavow file that burns legitimate links along with the rest. I checked, classified, documented – and then deliberately did nothing further. That is the professional response here, not the lazy one.