Are you worried that your website has spam links? These malicious links are inserted into websites with the intent of manipulating the search engine result pages (SERPs). To protect your site and avoid the risk of being overshadowed by unethical businesses, it’s important to find and remove spam links right away.
Below we’ll go over the basics of finding and removing spam links.
How to determine if your site is infected
Spam links are inserted in site files or in the database. The best way to know if your site is infected is by doing a review of your site’s content. Typically, spam links are not ambiguous, which means they are visible as long as you go looking for them.
Spam links are usually related to one of the following fields:
- Pharmaceuticals
- Adult content
- Weight loss supplements
- Ringtones and music downloads
- Movie downloads
- Online casinos and gambling
- Replica designer sales
- Essay writing sales
Removing spam links from your site
To remove spam links from your website, you must analyze your site’s code and database. If you do not have experience with this, consult a professional like Magna Technology.
Here is the process we follow to identify and remove spam links:
- Review files. Spam links are usually found in footers, headers or within the theme functions. They are typically inserted as plain text links. When found, they are deleted.
- Review database. Spam links may also be inserted into your database, which means you could have hundreds or thousands of them on your site. It’s tedious to look through an entire database, so it helps to use a content management system (CMS) to edit multiple pages at once.
Protecting your site in the future
Generally speaking, sites are affected by spam links when there is some type of vulnerability present. To prevent this from happening to you, make sure that your site is secure and has no issues with bad code or compromised accounts. We also recommend a full site review because it’s possible that you have some type of malware on your site that allowed the links in the first place.
When you know where the vulnerabilities are on your site, you can fix them and ensure greater security going forward. As frustrating as spam links are, they are usually easy to fix. If you need help with this task or recovering your website after an attack, contact Magna Technology.
