Illegal drug links in your scan report

What the Illegal drugs list means

Every outbound link on the scanned site is followed to its destination. The Illegal drugs card appears when at least one of those destinations was judged to be about illegal drugs, and the list behind its Review these links button holds exactly those links, nothing else. A link can sit in several categories at once, so the same link may also appear under another card.

There is no blocklist for this category. A link lands here in one of two ways:

• Word match. The destination’s title, description or page text contains one of these phrases: “buy weed”, “buy cocaine”, “buy mdma”, “buy lsd”, “cannabis dispensary”, “darknet market” or “shrooms for sale”. A word match on its own is graded Needs review.
• AI analysis. The destination page is read together with the page that links to it, and judged to be about illegal drugs. This can be graded Not safe. See verdicts explained.

Unlike the pharma check, the drugs check does not look at the destination’s domain name. A shop with an innocent-sounding address is judged by what its pages say.

When a drug link is legitimate

The word list reads text, not intent, so legitimate pages can match. Common examples:

• A news article or court report about a darknet market takedown.
• A harm-reduction charity, a health service or a university study that discusses substances.
• A licensed cannabis dispensary linked from a site that is itself about cannabis, in a place where it is legal.
• A forum or review page where someone has quoted a phrase from the list.

Where the page that carries the link is itself about drugs or health, no Out of context chip is added. Link Signals does not check licences or legality. It reports on content and context.

When it is unwanted

A recipe blog, a plumber’s site or a school page that links to a seller of illegal drugs did not choose that link. That is almost always an injection: code added through an out-of-date plugin, a stolen password or a compromised hosting account. Injected links are often concealed, so look for the Hidden, Cloaked and Hidden in script chips described in hidden links.

Why it matters

• Reputation. Visitors who click land on a site you never chose, and it reflects on you.
• Search. A page carrying injected links can lose rankings, and a site can be marked as hacked in search results.
• Advertising. Ad networks and payment providers commonly restrict sites that send traffic to illegal products.
• Filters. Schools, libraries and workplaces may block a site that links to this content.

In your report

The card is titled Illegal drugs and carries a High risk chip, the same level as malware, adult and pharma. It is shown only when something was found. Its four figures are Flagged links, On a blocklist (always zero here, as there is no list), Off-topic for their page and Hidden from visitors. Its suggested action reads: remove the links to illegal-drug sites, and check how they were added.

Review these links opens the findings table filtered to this category. Each row has a Priority, a Destination with the reason, Signals, and Found on, the page that carries the link. The Signals column shows the category chip drugs, plus Out of context when the page is not about the subject, any concealment chips, and Followed when nothing stops the link passing ranking credit. Choose a row to see the anchor text and the full detail. The action plan ranks Out of context findings above this plain category card.

What to do

1. Look at the destinationOpen it in a private window. A shop, a market listing or a page selling controlled substances is a clear case. A news story or a charity page is not.
2. Find the link on your pageOpen the page named in Found on and search its source for the anchor text. If it is not in the visible page, look for hidden, cloaked or script-written versions.
3. Decide whether you chose itIf the link is deliberate and the page is about the subject, mark the finding as reviewed. If you did not add it, remove it.
4. Close the way inUpdate plugins and themes, delete accounts you do not recognise, change passwords and check what else changed. After a WordPress hack has a fuller checklist.
5. Look for othersInjections rarely come singly. Check the other pages in the list and the other category cards, especially pharma.

Common mistakes

• Removing the one link in the report when the same code runs on every page through a shared template or widget.
• Marking the link nofollow and moving on. Visitors who click still arrive at the same place.
• Treating a clean category as a clean site. Only the listed phrases are matched, so a link that avoids them, such as an image, may not be caught.
• Leaving the compromised account in place after the links are gone.

How to confirm it is fixed

Run a re-check from the report once the changes are live. It reads only the pages your flagged links are on, so it is quick, and it shows whether the drug links still appears. Marking a finding as reviewed is a note to yourself, not a fix: the next scan reads the page again and calls the finding resolved only when the link is gone or no longer flagged. If it is still there, it comes back as Still flagged. On a monitored site, later scans keep watching for it to return.

How this counts in your LinkSignal

A link to a seller of illegal drugs is flagged as risky or unsafe, and that is what links that need review counts in your site’s external LinkSignal. If the same link is hidden, or sits on a page it does not fit, it is counted once in the hidden, cloaked and script-injected links or out of context links row instead. The LinkSignal overview lists every row, and how the score is worked out gives the points. LinkSignal is Link Signals’ own metric, worked out only from what this tool finds, and it is not connected to any search engine or third-party score.