u/SeriousEquivalent366

I manage two sites and over the last 2-3 months both started pulling in a flood

of obvious junk backlinks. Wanted to sanity-check with people who've seen this at scale.

What I'm seeing:

• Site A (established, DR ~72): +600 referring domains in 3 months, the bulk of

  them DR 0-1 throwaway domains on .info / .xyz / .store / .asia / .shop

• Site B (newer, small profile): ~70% of its referring domains are now flagged

  as spam, almost all on the same .shop network

• It's clearly ONE operation. The exact same spam domains link to both of my

  sites, and others.

• The anchors give it away. They're not money-keyword attacks. They're either

  the spammers advertising their own service ("...high-quality backlinks, guest

  posts, on-page SEO for rising DR/DA/TF...", Telegram handles) or generic

  "Visit Website" in 8 different languages. My domain is just filler to get

  their pages indexed.

The part that confuses me: on the established site, organic traffic went UP

roughly 5x over the exact same window the spam arrived, and DR kept climbing.

My questions for people who've dealt with this:

1. With Penguin being real-time and SpamBrain ignoring this stuff, is there any

   real-world case where these automated blasts actually dragged rankings down?

2. Do you bother disavowing at the domain level, or is that a waste of time now?

3. Does it change anything that one of the sites is brand new and small, so the

   spam is a huge % of its total link profile? Does a thin profile make a young

   domain more vulnerable to this than an established one?

4. Anyone tracked a clean before/after on disavow vs ignore for this exact

   pattern?

Not looking to clean up links I never built, just trying to figure out if this

is noise or something that needs action...

Thanks :')

Small extension, published mid-May. A meeting transcriber, nothing huge.

Here's what's confusing me. The dev console says 98 total installs since launch, and the daily install chart tops out around 12 a day. Steady, small, believable.

But the public store listing's "users" number went 56, then 951 overnight, then 2,066 the next day. Installs didn't move during any of that. Same flat chart. So the two numbers are telling completely different stories.

From digging around I get the basics: the public "users" figure is weekly users, and it counts Chrome browsers that loaded the extension in the last 7 days, not people. Sync across devices and channels can turn one person into several. And it gets rounded into buckets above 1,000. Fine. But none of that explains a 20x gap on top of 98 installs. Sync inflation is supposed to be more like 1.5x to 3x, not 20x.

So I'm trying to work out which of these it actually is:

1. The public number is just lagging or glitching and will snap back down
2. Something in how weekly-users is counted genuinely balloons at low volume
3. I'm misreading the dashboard and the 98 isn't what I think it is

For anyone who's shipped an extension: have you watched your public count detach from installs like this? Did it correct itself, or did it stick? Mostly trying to figure out whether the public number is worth trusting at all this early, or if I should just ignore it and live off the install analytics.