You registered a domain a couple of weeks ago. You ran a backlink check, out of curiosity or because a tool emailed you, and found forty links from sites with names like rankprime.shop and pbnseolinks.shop. Every one is flagged SPAM in red.
Your first thought is that someone is attacking you. Your second is that you have done something wrong.
Neither is true, and you can stop worrying in about four minutes. Here is exactly what you are looking at.
What actually happened
When you register a domain, that registration becomes public almost immediately. Registries publish daily lists of newly registered domains. This is normal and has been true for decades — it is how the domain system stays transparent.
Those lists get scraped. There is a whole cottage industry of sites selling SEO services, and the cheapest way to look busy is to generate thousands of pages that appear to be case studies. Scrape a list of new domains, drop each name into a template, publish. Nobody reads them. They exist to look like a portfolio to the next person who lands on the site.
Your domain is in those pages because it was new, not because anyone looked at your business.
The example, with real numbers
We watched this happen on one of our own domains, so we can show you rather than describe it.
We registered a second domain — searchspruce.com — and pointed it at our main address, the way most businesses do when they want both spellings. Inside about two weeks, forty-one links had appeared from domains like linkpicks.shop, seocrate.shop, rankbox.shop and toprankcompany.shop. Every one flagged as spam.
The first landed within days of the registration going public. That gap is the whole story. There was nothing on that domain to look at, form an opinion about, or link to — it did nothing but redirect. Something found the registration record, not the website.
Three ways to know it is automated
The copy is generated from a template. Read two of them side by side and the seams show:
“Everything searchspruce.com needs: premium guest posts, high-quality backlinks, on-page SEO, local SEO, web development…”
“Scale searchspruce.com with contextual backlinks, premium guest posts, on-page SEO, local SEO, custom web development…”
Same sentence, shuffled. Now the giveaway. Two of the pages pointing at us contained this:
“the link-building strategy delivered over 150 dofollow links for {site_name}”
{site_name} is a placeholder. Their script failed to substitute our domain and published the raw template. No human was involved at any point.
They are all nofollow. This is the part that matters most and the part people miss. A nofollow link carries an instruction telling search engines not to pass any ranking credit through it. Every single link pointing at us was nofollow. They are mechanically incapable of affecting our rankings, in either direction.
They arrive in a burst and then stop. Forty of them inside a week, then nothing. Real links trickle in as people find you. Automated ones land all at once because a script ran.
Why it cannot hurt you
Google has been dealing with this for longer than most SEO companies have existed.
In December 2022 Google announced a link spam update built on SpamBrain, its AI spam-detection system. The important word in that announcement is neutralise. Google’s systems do not punish you for spam links pointing at your site — they ignore them. The link is discounted, and it is as if it were never there.
This distinction matters enormously and gets lost constantly. If spam links pointing at a site could damage it, anyone could destroy a competitor for the price of a cheap link package. Google has spent fifteen years making sure that does not work, because a search engine where competitors can delete each other is a broken search engine.
So the links sit there in your backlink report, flagged red, doing nothing at all.
What Google says about disavowing them
There is a tool in Search Console called Disavow Links. It tells Google to ignore specific links. When people find spam links, this is what they reach for.
Google’s own documentation is unusually direct about it:
“In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most sites will not need to use this tool.”
And Google gives two conditions, both of which must be true before you use it. You need a considerable number of spammy or artificial links, and those links must have caused a manual action against your site, or be likely to.
A manual action is a human reviewer at Google deciding your site broke the rules. You would know, because it appears in Search Console under Manual Actions. If that page says “No issues detected”, the second condition is not met and the tool is not for you.
Google also attaches a warning that is worth reading twice:
“This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google Search results.”
That is Google saying the tool is more likely to hurt you than the spam is. Disavow files are blunt. Disavow a domain by mistake and you have thrown away a real link that was helping you, with no warning and no easy way to notice.
Google’s John Mueller has put it plainly: the disavow tool “is not something that you need to do on a regular basis. It’s not a part of normal site maintenance.”
So what should you do
Open Search Console and look at Manual actions. If it says no issues detected, you are finished. Close the tab.
That is genuinely the whole procedure. There is no cleanup, no removal requests, no monthly audit. Spam links pointing at a new site are weather, not damage.
If you want something useful to do with the time, spend it getting one real link. A chamber of commerce listing, a supplier who will mention you, a local organisation you sponsor. One editorial link from a real business in your town is worth more than the absence of a thousand spam links.
When it actually is a problem
There is a version of this that is worth taking seriously, and it looks completely different. It is worth knowing the difference, especially if you have taken over a site someone else was running.
| Automated spam | Links someone paid for | |
|---|---|---|
| Link type | Almost always nofollow | Dofollow — the whole point was passing credit |
| Anchor text | Your domain, or generic | Keyword-stuffed: “best emergency plumber Courtenay BC” |
| Pattern | A burst, then nothing | Steady over the months someone was being paid |
| Sites | SEO-services templates | Blogs and directories that look almost real |
| Who did it | Nobody, a script | Someone your business hired |
The second column is the one that can cause a manual action, because buying links to manipulate rankings is against Google’s spam policies. Note who takes the risk: the site that bought them.
If you inherited a site and the profile looks like the right-hand column, that is worth a proper look. If it looks like the left-hand column, it is noise.
The short version
Spam links appearing at a brand-new domain are the internet’s background radiation. They are automated, they are nofollow, Google discards them, and the tool people reach for to clean them up carries an official warning that it can damage your site.
Check Manual actions. If it is clear, go and do something that actually moves the needle.
If you have found something in your backlink profile that worries you and you would like a second opinion, get in touch — we will look at it and tell you honestly whether it is noise or something real. No charge, and no interest in selling you a cleanup you do not need.