Questionable Backlinks

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Sam “H” Mah: Hello guys. ; I took over someone's SEO project. This SEO guy gathered some backlinks for the site.  ; Some backlinks are questionable.  ; Now, one of sites displays this message: You don't have permission to access the requested directory. There is either no index document or the directory is read-protected.
  
  I am curious ; why Google is displaying this on the search console. Was this a bad backlink? ; Was this guy using ; a private blog network method? ;
  
  Any advice on this topic is greatly appreciated. Thanks all.
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  Suraj Gadage: +Sam Mah ;There is a possibility that the backlink was coming from a site/webpage that was accessible earlier but may be the webmaster has removed the webpage/directory that's why you are getting this message. Without looking at the backlink domain I can't confirm whether its a link from PBN or some other sites.
  
  I'm curious to know, where exactly do you see this message in webmasters account?
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  Neeraj Pandey: As +Suraj Gadage ; said, please let us know where you are seeing this message
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  Edwin Jonk: I like to know where in the search console it is displaying this. Namely, that message is a standard message from an Apache server when serving a 403.
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  Sam “H” Mah: Hey guys, sorry for confusing eveyrone. ; I viewed whose website link to ours on Google search console, so I copied the link on the browser to find what type of website is. Right now this website ; displays that message. ; ;
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  Edwin Jonk: +Sam Mah I see. Then I wouldn't worry too much about it. Because the link is or will be dropped as soon as Googlebot crawls the 403 URL.
  
  However if the domain is questionable you could disavow the whole domain.
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  Sam “H” Mah: +Edwin Jonk Thanks.
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  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this week's SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:24:14 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/questionable_backlinks +Sam Mah
  
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