How/Why do I have so many Spam backlinks?

[carlystemmer]

I was looking in GWT yesterday and found we have several thousand "spam" backlinks...I am curious why this happens and how this happens?

There are some links from websites/domains that are not mine that appear to be spam. However, we own a large group of domains and have noticed some of the links are coming from 2 of those sites/domains we own to my main site. The sites/domains are not active, we just own them. I am wondering how someone could access these domains that are not active and create spammy backlinks to my main website? (They created about 20,000 links).

Thanks.

[carlystemmer]

I don't think so...We had owned the domains for several years and the bad links have just come up in webmaster tools recently.

[TimHolmes]

Could it be possible that you are not the original owner of the domain and that in a former era the domain was once active and used for dodgy linking?

[carlystemmer]

Thanks! No we haven't hired anyone to do any backlink building for us in the past which is why were really curious to know how one of our domains got hacked (loyaltyexpo-europe.com) which isn't even active and had made thousands and thousands of backlinks to our main site loyalty360.org.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Have you done any link building in the past? Or have you had any SEO companies do work for you?

With the 2 sites that are linking to the other sites, are there footer links or site-wide links of any kind?

I would run through a backlink audit and look into removing any potentially spammy backlinks or disavowing.

If you feel your site has been hacked, you can look into this resource from Google about what you can do to remedy the situation.

Hope this helps! Good luck!