Is this link spam?
The honest answer: context is everything, and any tool that claims a single score settles it is selling something. Here’s how to read a suspicious link.
Look at the source, not the score
Does the linking site have real content for real readers? Farm sites fail the five-second test: empty templates, auto-generated articles, no about page, no humans. Authority metrics don’t save them — we see farm networks with manufactured metrics in the 40s.
Read the anchor text
Natural anchors are messy: brand names, URLs, “this guide”. Manufactured anchors are exact-match commercial phrases, repeated across unrelated sites — or literal advertising. We’ve sunk sources whose anchor text was the seller’s own Telegram handle offering “mass backlinking”.
One signature worth knowing by name: anchors reading “@seo_cartel in telegram, seo backlinks, bulk link posting, boost seo ranking” — a sold-by-brand farm, bulk-priced, fired from blogspot PBN shells. If those anchors point at you, you did not buy links; the wave was aimed, and the seller’s brand in the anchor is what makes it look self-inflicted. The call: sink the source at the edge — a disavow file is cleanup, not defence.
Check where it points
Real links point at pages that exist and are relevant. Manufactured links point at deep URLs that never existed, or at your commercial pages with anchors that make no editorial sense.
Zoom out to the pattern
One odd link is noise. The attack is the pattern: dozens of registrations on the same day, hosts named like lottery numbers, the same anchor across forty unrelated sites, a wave that arrives right after you outrank someone.
The hacked-innocent case
Some spam links come from sites that are themselves victims — a church, a wedding page, a small business with an injected link. The right call is to sink the injected page, not the whole domain. Blanket-sinking victims is how tools do the attacker’s job for them.
What we do with it
Add your domain and let the free check take a first pass — then work the triage lists with what you know about your niche. You keep the final say, always.