We found 453 spam backlinks pointing at our own domain. Here is the audit.

In August 2026 we ran a routine backlink pull on our own domain and found a link profile we did not build. The Ahrefs export showed 453 backlinks from 429 referring domains — and only 9% of the backlinks (7% of the domains) were dofollow. A second, Majestic-style Trust Flow pull showed 190 backlinks from 109 domains. Almost none of it was a real mention of the product.

This post is the worked example we wish we had read earlier: what an automated spam-link profile looks like from the inside, using our own raw data — no invented numbers, no composite anecdotes.

What sampling the referring pages revealed

The referring-domains list was dozens of near-duplicate names on throwaway TLDs — .shop, .store, .cv, .website — with names like domainrankexpress.shop, seoexpress-professional-white-hat-team.store, and rankwagon.shop. Pulling the actual pages showed a single automated PBN operation, producing two page templates:

• Identical "Where to buy aged domains and backlinks" filler pages, one per domain, repeated across dozens of the network's sites, each linking to top-founders.com with a bare-URL anchor.
• Fabricated "case study" testimonial pages, machine-assembled from one template — a persona, a link-buying tactic, a vertical, a timeframe, and a ranking claim (one real title: "18-month SERP climb — B2B, combined crowd links, SaaS tools, position 1") — with top-founders.com named as the satisfied client. We never bought anything from these operators; the reference itself is the product they are selling to someone else.

The part that actually costs you

The direct ranking damage from a network like this is small — that is what 91% nofollow and negligible authority means. The real cost is quieter. When junk dominates your link profile, your organic footprint is mostly noise you do not control: the loudest pages on the open web that mention your name are fabricated testimonials for a link-selling operation. And invisibility compounds. Search engines and AI answer engines build their picture of a product from whatever public record exists; a competitor whose footprint is substance gets found and cited, while a domain whose footprint is spam-adjacent noise simply does not come up. You will not see this loss in any dashboard — it shows up as the absence of your name in answers where competitors appear.

That gap widens on its own. Every quarter a competitor spends publishing citable pages while your public record stays junk-heavy, the answer-engine default hardens a little further in their favor — and defaults, once formed, are expensive to displace.

What we did — and deliberately did not do

We did not file a disavow in this pass. With over 90% of the links nofollow and the source domains carrying negligible authority, disavowing is hygiene rather than an emergency, and we flagged it as a follow-up instead of a reaction. We also skipped takedown-chasing entirely: pursuing a thirty-domain throwaway network is a worse use of a small team's time than out-producing it. The decision we did make was to publish real content — including this audit — into the same keyword space the network fakes, so the substantive record about our domain grows faster than the noise.

If you have never looked at your own referring domains, this week is a good time — the free vendor checkers are enough to spot a profile like ours. And if you want the other half of the picture, what your public pages say versus your competitors', a free run at top-founders.com/analyze will show you exactly which claims machines can extract from each of you.