How to Find and Remove Spammy Backlinks

In most industries, a spam link attack is bad luck. In this one, it is Tuesday. Adult sites ranking for money terms collect junk links constantly: some from scraper networks that copy everything, some from competitors who would rather you ranked nowhere. Knowing how to find and remove the harmful ones is routine maintenance here, not crisis response.

Where the spam comes from

Three sources account for nearly all of it. Scraper and aggregator sites that republish content and links automatically. Old sins, if the site ever bought cheap link packages, those domains rot and turn toxic over time. And deliberate attacks, where someone fires thousands of links with commercial anchors (“london escorts”, and worse) at your domain hoping Google reads it as your own manipulation.

The first two are hygiene. The third is negative SEO, and it has its own full playbook. This guide covers the part they share: finding the links and deciding what to do.

Finding them

Start in Search Console

Two places matter. Security and Manual Actions tells you whether a human reviewer has already flagged your link profile; if there is a manual action here, removal stops being optional. And the Links report shows your top linking sites and anchors, which is where an attack shows up first: a domain you have never heard of suddenly in your top ten, or an anchor you would never use.

Then a backlink tool

Ahrefs, Semrush or Moz will show you the full profile with the metrics that matter: referring domain quality, anchor distribution, and link velocity. Moz’s Spam Score is a useful shortlist builder, anything high goes on the review pile. Sort new referring domains by first-seen date and attacks become obvious: hundreds of domains appearing in a week is not organic anything.

Deciding what is actually harmful

Here is the part most guides skip: most spam links need no action at all. Google discounts obvious junk automatically, and disavowing ten thousand harmless scraper links achieves nothing except a weekend lost. Act when one of three things is true: you have a manual action naming unnatural links, the spam mimics deliberate manipulation (commercial exact-match anchors at scale), or a ranking drop lines up with a link spike in time.

Calibrate your eye with the inverse. Our link quality checklist is what a link should look like; anything scoring zero on every check is a candidate. And if the junk in your profile came from tactics a previous agency ran on purpose, read our black hat link building guide to recognise the rest of the footprint before Google does.

Removing them

Outreach first, in theory: contact the site and ask for removal. In practice, spam sites have no contact form and no interest, so removal usually means Google’s Disavow tool. Upload a text file of domains (use domain-level lines, not individual URLs) and Google stops counting them against you.

Disavow in phases rather than in bulk: highest-risk domains first, then watch for two to four weeks before the next batch. Keep the file maintained, because in this sector the spam does not stop arriving. And keep a dated copy of every version, so you can reverse a mistake.

Make it routine

A monthly half-hour beats an annual crisis. Check new referring domains, scan anchors for anything commercial you did not build, and update the disavow file when something genuinely harmful lands. We run this for every client site because prevention is cheap and recovery is not. If your profile already looks like a crime scene, we can take a look.