disavow spam backlinks on shopify site

[HelpHelpHelp]

Morning all. My site has been attacked with the with the dreaded spam backlinks that have been emerging on many peoples stores. My theme has been edited and updated to hopefully stop this situation from happening again. I've been told i need to disavow the spam backlinks. I have very little technical ability / knowledge when it comes to situations like this so i thought i'd ask the shopify community for some guidance. I've included a screengrab above to illustrate a sample of what is coming up on google when i do a full site search. At the moment i have around 12 of these dodgy links showing. If you look at where the arrow is pointing on the image above you can see three small vertical blue dots. When i click this the white box to the right shows up and displays the full link. Is it this link that i need to copy and input into googles disavow section???? I thought i'd better ask to make sure i'm doing this correctly. I need to get this right as my site traffic has dropped to virtually zero...... Any guidance would be greatly appreciated..... Many Thanks

[HelpHelpHelp]

Morning. Thanks for the reply. I've been in touch with shopfy several times about this issuse and they have been absolutely no use at all if i'm honest. It's almost like they are avoiding accepting there is an issue with this spam backlink problem occuring on their platform which is why i'm reaching out on the community to see if i can get some step by step advice on how to tackle this issuse. It's a tricky one as i'm a one man outfit. I don't have technnical people around me - there is only me to keep the site running and functioning as it should. This could put me out of business!...

What i need is some step by step guidance on who to find all these bad backlinks that have occured on my wesbite and also how to go through the disavow process. I'm sure i'm not the only one who could do with this information. I'm hoping some kind soul see's this post and can assist..... Here's hoping anyway....

[yannis23]

As per usual Shopify avoids all issues that do not concern the platform and its monetization. We are also being spammed with trash backlinks from ghost pages generated by outdated WordPress sites, pages ending with a "-k.html" that point to many images on our website and affect our SEO. After research, one way of resolving this matter is blocking this type of spam from the server side but Shopify clearly avoids the issue and looks the other way.

I understand we are not the only ones and perhaps when the numbers of affected Shopify sites increase and users start changing to other platforms they might actually do something about it. 

Regarding the Disavow process you need to go to the Google page, select your property for your list of sites, and include the website you want to disavow.  Try doing the whole domain from www.siteexample.com should be more efficient.  This option is not guaranteed but worth a try. 

https://search.google.com/search-console/disavow-links

[brandwise--owl]

I only know of one way to resolve this issue. Use the SEMRush 14-day trial. You'll have to add your card info, so set a reminder for yourself to shut it off before you're charged. 

Once you're in, go to the SEO tab on the left, select 'Backlink analysis', run your URL through the audit, mine took around 10min to complete. Then, once this is done, go to the 'Backlink audit' tab on the left (shown below).

What I do at this point is go through the list and anything with a very low authority score and/or high toxicity score that you don't recognize, check these off. Once you have all the bad backlinks checked, click the disavow button (circle icon, circled in red below) to add them to your disavow list (we'll upload this list to Google later). I usually select 'domains' instead of 'URLs' because the domains will block out more URLs from those same domains. Less upkeep.

 

Once you've added them to your disavow list, go to the 'Disavow' tab to the right of where it says 'Audit' (shown below).

Click 'export to .txt', no changes are needed on the text file. 

Now you'll go to Google's disavow tool: https://search.google.com/search-console/disavow-links and select your URL in the property dropdown, if you don't have a URL property you might need to add one, you can try using the domain property but it's never worked for me.

That's it! I go through and do this weekly sometimes monthly, you can keep doing trials or find another free tool but I find SEMRush to be the easiest to use.