: Backlinks coming in from strange/unknown referrer am new on stackexchange, so I apologize in advance if this is the wrong place to post. I am in the midst of clearing up links to my website

@Megan663

There's a lot of different reasons people link to your site. If it's a spammy domain, you don't need to worry about the reason why, because it's certainly not to improve UX. If you don't want the site linking to you, just disavow it in Webmaster tools, don't waste your time writing to a spammy domain who probably won't answer back.

Also, this is a great tool to cross reference domains you're unsure that you should disavow or not: www.disavowfiles.com/

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@LarsenBagley505

Softlayer (just from searching on google) is a company that rents out server space to their customers to host websites. Anyone can sign up with them if they have sufficient money.

There's a couple of possibilities as to why disabledsportsmen.net appeared as a referrer in your server logs.


Someone may have submitted a story about your website to a page on disabledsportsmen.net along with images hot-linked to your server. This means any guest that loads the story in their browser will automatically load the image from YOUR server to their browser. Matters are far worse if you do not implement any proper caching with any of the images.
There may be a special program installed on the computer associated with the IP address thats associated with disabledsportsmen.net. The special program is then set to download items from your website. If you see tons of entries from this URL in your server log and the time printed for each entry is very similar (where each entry is up to one second away from the last), then its definitely a program from the server doing it. The actual name for the people behind this kind of operation are known as "script kiddies".


As for your last question, If the reason for the entry in your logs is what I described in #1 above, then contact the people at disabledsportsmen.net and ask them to remove all entries containing any direct links to any element of your site. If however the reason is #2 then you'll need to limit access to the IP address or block access depending on whether or not legit users also use that IP address to connect to you.

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