88% of Small Business Websites Have Backlinks From Likely Spam Pages

A family dentist runs a backlink report for the first time and finds links from a betting site, a quotes page and a news-style website she has never heard of, all pointing at her homepage. Scrolling down, she sees that most of her other links do not use her practice's name at all: they show her bare web address or a button that says "Visit website". She assumes someone is attacking her website and that her real links are written wrong. In fact, almost every other small business in her town has the same links.

A backlink is a link from another website to yours, and its clickable text, called anchor text, is read by search engines as a short description of the page it points to. Links from trusted, relevant websites help a page rank; links from spam pages carry no value and, in large numbers, can make a link profile look manipulated. Knowing what a normal small business link profile looks like tells an owner which parts of their report are background noise and which are worth acting on.

Spam is the default. 88% of small business websites have at least one backlink from a page scored as likely spam, and on the average small business website one link in four is spammy. Most of it comes from a small set of domains that link to almost every small business at once. The rest of a normal profile is led by the web address, not the brand: 36% of backlinks use a bare address, twice the 17.9% that use the business's name.

We picked 250 random websites from US small businesses listed on Google in 56 industries; 249 had backlink records. For each website we collected up to 1,000 live backlinks on September 23, 2026, 68,859 in all, each with a spam score from 0 to 100 that rates how likely the linking page is to be spam. Of those, 60,673 are text links, with clickable words rather than an image, and for these we also sorted the anchor text.

A backlink counts as spammy when its spam score is 60 or higher. We measured each website's share of spammy links and averaged it across websites, so each small business counts once, and split spam rates by domain rank, a score of how strong and well linked the linking website is. Each anchor falls into one type: a web address (it contains the website's address or domain), the brand name (it matches the business name behind the domain), a generic phrase ("click here", "website", "contact us" and similar), empty (no clickable text), or other text, which covers keywords and page titles.

219 of the 249 small business websites have at least one spammy backlink. On the average website, 25.2% of backlinks score 60 or higher, and the median website sits at 24.7%, so a quarter of the link profile is spam for a typical small business, not just for a few unlucky ones. With a looser cutoff of 30 or higher, the average share rises to 54.2%, more than half.

At the heavy end, 7.7% of the average website's backlinks score 70 or higher, and 11.6% of small business websites have half or more of their backlinks scored as spammy. For those businesses, spam makes up most of what a backlink tool shows, which can make their real links hard to see and their link profile look far weaker than it is.

636 different domains sent spammy links to these small business websites, but a small group stands out. One domain links to 204 of the 249 websites, and eight others each link to between 185 and 203 of them, usually with a single link per website. Among them are a quotes site, a betting mirror site, a fashion news site and a map-directory site.

A domain that links to four in five small businesses at random is not targeting anyone; it links in bulk. A different pattern shows up at the top of the spam list by volume: one domain sent 959 spammy links, all to a single website. That kind of concentrated burst is rarer, but it can make up most of a small website's link profile, and it is the case worth acting on.

Spam is concentrated on weak linking websites. Backlinks from websites with a domain rank above 400 are scored as spammy 0.2% of the time. Links from websites ranked 1 to 100 are spammy 22.8% of the time, and from websites with a rank of 0, 15%.

That is the clearest guide for link building. Spam lives on weak, thinly linked websites. Links from established websites, the kind that take effort to earn, are almost never spam, and they are the ones that help a small business rank.

Web address anchors are the largest type by a wide margin. Brand and web address anchors together make up 53.9% of backlinks, and other text, mostly keywords and page titles, makes up 24.4%. For the average small business website, the brand share is lower still, at 10.6%, because a few websites with many branded links pull the overall figure up.

This is what a natural link profile looks like when most links come from listings and profiles rather than articles. A directory prints the address because that is what it has on file. Nobody writes the anchor by hand, so it is rarely the brand and almost never a keyword. A small business whose anchors look like this has nothing to fix.

The top exact anchors show where small business links come from. "website" appears on 4,346 links and "visit website" on 3,114. Of those two anchors, 2,535 links, about a third, come from four directories: Yellow Pages, DexKnows, Superpages and LocalityBiz. The Italian "visita il sito" ("visit the site") appears on 1,736 links, and 2,414 links have no anchor text at all.

Generic phrases make up 17.7% of backlinks and empty anchors 4%. These links still count, and many of them come from listings that help customers find a business's phone number and hours. They simply tell search engines nothing about what the business does.

Two of the most repeated anchors are gambling phrases: "mix parlay" on 748 links and the Indonesian slot-machine phrase "slot gacor gampang menang" on 599. Both rank among the 15 most common anchors across all 60,673 text links, and both point at ordinary small business websites that have nothing to do with gambling.

These are the anchor-text side of the spam domains above: links placed in bulk by spammers, which the business on the receiving end rarely knows about. A look at your own most common anchors is the fastest way to spot them, because a phrase you would never use for your business stands out immediately.

If your backlink report shows a large share of spammy links, you are in the majority and you almost certainly did not cause it. Google says it ignores most spam links on its own, so do not rush to disavow hundreds of domains. Save a disavow file, the list that asks Google to ignore specific links, for cases where you bought links, received a manual penalty from Google, or see a sudden flood from one domain like the 959-link case above.

A link profile full of bare web addresses and "website" anchors is also normal, so there is nothing to fix there. What moves rankings is adding links from strong, relevant websites with descriptive anchors, such as your business name plus your service and city: local press, industry associations, suppliers and partners. Ask for them when you are featured. Those links outweigh the spam, and they are almost never scored as spam themselves.

Check your most common anchors and your spammy share once or twice a year, and note any gambling, pharmacy or foreign-language phrases you did not earn. Good link building services do both jobs: they earn descriptive links from established websites and check whether any spam in your profile needs action.

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