“-k.html” Backlinks: What Are They?

If you’ve logged into your Ahrefs or Semrush account and spotted a high increase in backlinks from pages ending in “-k.html” or “k.html”, you might be worried about the effect these will have on your overall SEO performance.

The article below explains what’s causing these linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. and what you can do.

What’s generating -k.html links?

Based on our data, most referring sites appear to be built on WordPress. At face value, these websites look to be relatively outdated. With this in mind, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the issue arose due to a legacy WordPress plug-in vulnerability being exploited.

The pages that are being generated are being created programmatically by bots. These bots simply crawl successful websites that rank for specific keywords and take images and content to spin pages on the fly.

Why generate these pages in the first place?

The goal is not completely clear. If you visit the generated pages, sometimes you’ll get a badly constructed page full of content. You might get a prompt from your anti-virus saying it’s a phishing attack. Or, it will load a page that looks unaffected, meaning you can’t even see the links to your website present.

Our gut feeling is that these pages are intentionally randomised and will likely be doing some user-agent detection to present different information to bots than they do to the general public.

As with any virus, its goal is to grow; perhaps each hack looks for other websites to hack as part of its scraping process. This exploit will no doubt grow until whatever vulnerability on the external websites is occurring has been patched and fixed.

How will it affect me?

We’d like to think Google and Bing are sophisticated enough to ignore this background noise. After all, things like this come and go and have for years.

Still, if you see this activity rising and organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page. and/or ranking positions falling, the two could be linked, especially if nothing else has changed and you’ve been affected more than others.

A good example of a website that has seen this activity but has been unaffected looks something like this:

The arrow denotes the start of the activity and hike in “-k.html” backlinks. Organic traffic has very much just continued on a steady upward path.

If you’ve been negatively affected, the orange line of organic traffic will likely appear more like a downward cliff edge.

The above is a great example of how generating high-volume, low-quality backlinks have created a ‘peak and trough’ effect in estimated traffic levels in Ahrefs. You can also see the axis for the blue line (referring domains) is growing rapidly and has been for some time.

What can I do about it?

If any links are hotlinking to images, you can configure your server to reject hotlinks to images with referrers that are not your own website or a ‘safe list’ of places that can hotlink. However, keep in mind that any good links you generate from images embedded elsewhere will be lost unless you whitelist all good domains. Unfortunately, this is not always feasible for future opportunities.

In Apache HTTP Server, you can prevent image hotlinking via your .htaccess file. Please test your code heavily before going live. Additionally, similar steps can be taken on other hosting platforms.

Another option is to disavow all of the domains that are being listed. This is somewhat easy to filter out as most backlinks end in ‘-k.html’. Still, disavowing should only be done if you have clear signs that there is a direct relationship between bad links and a fall in organic performance; there is no need to do it if your performance is steady.

Is that it?

Yes! In short: ride it out. However, if you feel you’ve been negatively affected, take actions to reduce the impact, whether that’s disavowing or preventing image hotlinks.

What if my website is generating -k.html pages?

It’s time to speak to your developers and/or hosting company to understand how much your website has been affected and get it cleaned up. Run all system updates (server-side and code-side), change passwords, and perhaps consider a Web Application Firewall to help protect your website against common vulnerabilities.

If you need any assistance with anything in this article, we’re here to help! Click Intelligence has many years of experience in link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. and SEO and on standby to assist. Contact us today.