Imagine that one day I would write a story here and it would go viral, and get an insane amount of attention. Okay, I wrote a few stories that have done that. But should you be worried about the spammy links viral stories attract? The answer is no, according to Google.
John Mueller of Google was asked on Twitter if one should disavow the spammy links that you see from an article going viral. John said "no need" to do that. The question was "My company recently went viral with a news article, and naturally, that gave us a lot of links from large newspapers around the globe. However, tons of spam sites with no traffic or backlinks also started linking to us. Should we disavow?" John responded "no need."
Here are those tweets:
no need.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) July 6, 2021
You're extrapolating too much. I didn't say that no links matter. If your site has paid links it's good to fix that regardless of who put them there, or when that happened.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) July 7, 2021
Google has been saying for a long time now that it can handle these spammy links in a way that does not demote your site but it just ignores the links. The whole Penguin devaluing vs demoting aspect. Well, here is one case of this.
Also, if someone on the manual actions team saw these spammy links to an article that got tons of natural links, it is also natural to see spammy links to a popular page. So that all should be fine.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
