Why I Ignored Diib’s “Backlink Spam” Warning

An SEO tool flagged a fake problem, then sold me the fix. Here is what Google actually does with spammy links.

I got an email from Diib this week. Out of roughly 36,000 backlinks, only about 6,500 came from different domains, which works out to around five links per site. The email warned that search engines might read this as backlink spam and that it could hurt my Google rankings. Directly below the warning sat their recommended fix: pay for their Authority Boost service and let them build me backlinks.

So is their business plan…
Step 1: Manufacture a worry.
Step 2: Sell the cure.

The flagged metric is not a ranking signal

A ratio of total backlinks to referring domains is not something Google grades you on. Multiple links from one site is normal. A blog mentions you across several posts. A site puts your link in its footer or navigation. A news outlet covers you more than once. All of that runs up the count without meaning anything bad.

Diib’s own email even admits this. It says that if CNN links to you 300 times, that is fine. So they raise the alarm, walk it back in the same breath, then point you to a paid service anyway.

What Google actually does with junk links

For years, Google has ignored low-quality links rather than penalizing for them. The link gets neutralized. It is clipped out of the calculation and counts for nothing, good or bad. There is no negative signal flowing from a spammy inbound link to your site.

At one point, Google expected users to go out and “disavow” spammy links, because they believed people were buying links (which is against Google’s Search Spam Policies) and wanted to give them a chance to “fix” their errors. But, in my opinion, once people realized that buying links is cheap, and Google was getting better at recognizing it, they figured out how to weaponize it against their competitors. Why improve my site, when I can tank yours for cheap? So I believe Google changed their approach and stopped penalizing websites that had “toxic” links a long time ago to help fix this mess they created.

John Mueller posted this on Reddit’s r/SEO when someone asked what to do about a suspected negative SEO attack. His point: a competitor good enough to build links Google trusts will not waste them on you, and one who is not good enough builds links that do nothing. Documented by Search Engine Journal.

A couple of years later, answering someone panicking over a Semrush toxic-link report, he was blunter:

“Let your competitor spend that sweet $5 for nothing.”

He told the person to ignore the Semrush report and put that time into building a better site instead. (Documented by Search Engine Roundtable, which links the original Reddit thread.)

On the disavow tool itself, Google’s position is that it is not part of normal site maintenance. Use it if you have a manual action in Search Console, or if you knowingly bought or built manipulative links in the past. Otherwise leave it alone, because disavowing links you should have kept can cost you rankings.

The SEO field mostly agrees

This is not just Google talking its own book. Lily Ray of Amsive has written that the toxic-link tools mostly surface junk Google already ignores, and she put it plainly:

“the majority of disavow work that is done by SEOs is unnecessary”

(From her guide on Search Engine Land.)

Someone also ran the test. Joshua Hardwick at Ahrefs disavowed 129 links that a tool had flagged as toxic or potentially toxic across three of the company’s blog posts. Traffic did not improve. It fell about 7 percent over the next three weeks, with no meaningful gain on any of the pages. Patrick Stox, who reviewed the numbers, noted that Search Console data swings with seasonality and luck, so the honest read is that the cleanup did nothing useful. You can read the experiment here. Worth a caveat: a separate Stox experiment that stripped all links from a set of pages did sink their rankings, but that proves the reverse point, that real links matter, not that junk links hurt you.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable, who tracks Google’s statements as closely as anyone, summed up the disavow-for-hire pitch as a billable waste of time. The through-line is the same from all of them. Spend your energy on the site, not on chasing links a tool flagged.

So what’s up with Diib?

Diib’s recommended fix is to sell you backlinks. Buying and placing links is the exact practice Google’s spam guidelines warn against. The free “DA 60+ backlink” they dangle for signing up is a placed paid link. So the alert invents a problem using a metric Google does not use, then sells you the one thing that could actually put you at risk.

If you get one of these emails, you can close it. The only place a real link problem shows up is the Manual Actions report inside Google Search Console, not a vendor’s inbox.