: Does a sudden increase in no-follow backlinks hurt my site? It's a two-month old website. Nearly a thousand unnatural no-follow backlinks were generated within 6 days with the same anchor text

@Michele947

When purchasing a new URL you need to run a few checks on its history.

You can use magestic.com to check out historical links and you can gain free access by registering your site.

You can also use archive.org to view the web history of the site.

If the domain looks to have a history of spam links then this may be the issue, Google will continue to see these spam links and associate them to your new site.

And if the previous owner had an algorithmic penalty (Penguin/links) then this also gets passed on to the new owner.

So I suggest you check the domain using the two URLs I provided and see what materialises.

I'm not trying to scare you but knowing sooner rather than later will help you on how to proceed.

If it turns out to be all clear then follow Closetnoc's excellent reply.

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@Becky754

Generally speaking, you will not need to disavow any links. This should remain a last resort for toxic links. Elsewhere I describe what a toxic link is. Please understand that most junk links are not toxic. For a link to be toxic, a lot has to happen.

It is possible that there was some negative effect, however, Google understands that spam sites will make links to other sites at will and generally does not penalize the target site (yours). In fact, enough spam links can help some by adding up tiny bits of value. I know of one site that has 58,000 spam links from two related sites and performs rather well because of them despite the very few links of value it has obtained. I am not suggesting that spam links are good- just not necessarily bad.

In your case, the site is new and any knock will really hurt. All new sites fluctuate wildly for a period while Google fills it's index and creates the various scores required. This can take months to do and any recalculation and refresh will effect your placement in the SERPs from day to day and even hour to hour. This is also of course dependent upon he search and competition for the search terms.

Do good work in creating your site and doing decent and honest SEO and your site will perform just fine in the end.

BTW- the various SEO websites are very incomplete and slow to keep up with changes. Do not count on them. The experts are Google's various tools. I suggest sticking to just these at least for a while.

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