A United States federal judge has let a claim about toxic backlinks move forward as false advertising. Judge Matthew Kennelly declined on 2 June 2026 to dismiss most of a lawsuit brought by auto transport company Montway LLC against rival Nexus AT LLC, which Montway accuses of building more than 2,350 spam links aimed at its site. Search Engine Land wrote up the ruling on 12 August 2026.
Read the next sentence before you read anything else about this case. The court has made no finding that Nexus AT did what Montway says it did, and no finding that Nexus AT is liable for anything. A motion to dismiss asks a narrow question: assuming the complaint is true, does it describe a claim the law recognises? Judge Kennelly answered yes for most of the claims. That is a procedural result, not a verdict.
What Judge Kennelly decided on 2 June 2026
The ruling, dated 2 June 2026 and covered by Search Engine Land on 12 August 2026, split the case. The federal Lanham Act false advertising claim survived. So did Montway's trademark claims and its claims under Illinois consumer protection law. The California unfair competition claims were dismissed. Everything that survived now goes on to the stage where evidence actually gets tested, which is where most of the hard questions live.
Judge Kennelly's reasoning on the false advertising point turned on how the links behaved rather than on rankings. The anchor text appeared to promise one destination while sending a reader somewhere else. That framing is what pulls the conduct inside a statute written about misleading commercial statements, instead of leaving it as a search engine hygiene problem with no legal home.
Here is where each claim stood after the ruling. The table reflects the disposition reported by Search Engine Land and nothing beyond it.
| Claim | Status after the 2 June 2026 ruling |
|---|---|
| Lanham Act false advertising (federal) | Allowed to proceed |
| Trademark claims | Allowed to proceed |
| Illinois consumer protection claims | Allowed to proceed |
| California unfair competition claims | Dismissed |
What Montway alleges Nexus AT did
Montway's complaint describes a link campaign running from April 2025 to October 2025 that put more than 2,350 backlinks in front of its domain. The anchor text is the part that made the case unusual. According to the complaint, it included phrases such as "buy steroids online", "Payday loan services", "illegal betting sites", "Cocaine powder online" and "unlicensed firearms". Montway sent a cease and desist letter in October 2025.
Two things separate that allegation from ordinary spam. The first is volume with a shape: a specific window, a specific target, a specific vocabulary. The second is that the vocabulary is not random junk. Anchor text about steroids, cocaine and unlicensed firearms attached to a car shipping brand is a claim about the brand, made to anyone who reads the link, and that is the hook the false advertising theory hangs on.
Whether any of it happened as described remains an open question. Nexus AT has not been found liable. The complaint is one side's account, and the ruling treats it as one side's account.
Why the false advertising angle is the interesting part
Companies that believe they have been targeted with hostile links have historically had thin options. You can report the pattern to the search engine. You can build a disavow file and upload it through Google Search Console, which is the tool Google provides for telling it to ignore specific links. Beyond that there was rarely a route that ended anywhere a lawyer could work with.
The Montway ruling tests whether a general purpose false advertising statute can reach that conduct. If a claim like this can survive dismissal, then a link attack becomes something a company can litigate rather than only something it reports. The word to keep in mind is "tests". One district judge letting one complaint past one motion is not settled law, and the case could still end with Nexus AT prevailing on the facts.
What the ruling does not establish
- It does not establish that Nexus AT built the links. That is an allegation.
- It does not measure any ranking damage. Nothing in the reported ruling quantifies a traffic or position loss.
- It does not say how Google treats links of this kind, and it is not a statement by Google about anything.
- It does not create a rule that other courts must follow.
- It does not tell you whether disavowing works, because that question was not in front of the judge.
Be careful with the second and fifth points in particular. Plenty of commentary about negative SEO assumes a direct line from spam links to lost rankings. This case does not supply that evidence, and neither this post nor the source article should be read as supplying it.
How to document a suspected link attack
Labelled analysis, not reporting: the following is our reading of what the case implies for record keeping, not something the court or Search Engine Land instructed anyone to do.
The detail that made Montway's complaint concrete was enumeration. It could point to a count, a window and the actual anchor text. A company that noticed the same thing but kept no records would have had a story instead of a filing. If you run an in house programme or work with an agency on link building, the practical takeaway is that the evidence has to exist before you need it, because backlink tools show you a rolling picture and old rows drop out.
What to export
- The full referring domain and referring page list for your site, with first seen date, anchor text and target URL on every row.
- Anchor text distribution, so an abnormal cluster is visible against your own baseline rather than against a generic idea of normal.
- New and lost link reports for the period, which is where a burst shows up as a shape rather than a total.
- A copy of every disavow file you upload, saved separately from the tool that generated it.
How often
Monthly is enough for most sites, weekly if you are in a vertical where this happens. The frequency matters less than the fact that each export is dated and kept. One export taken after you notice a problem tells you what exists today. A run of exports tells you when it started, and that is the difference between describing a suspicion and describing a window.
What a dated record needs to contain
- The date and time the export was taken, and the tool that produced it, stored inside the file and not only in the filename.
- Raw rows, not a summary. Counts are easy to challenge, row level data is not.
- The disavow history: which domains, uploaded on which date, by which account.
- Any correspondence, including a cease and desist if you send one, kept with the exports rather than in someone's inbox.
A quarterly SEO audit is a reasonable place to make these exports a standing item, because an audit already pulls the same data and the only change is that the file gets kept afterwards.
What this means for Thai marketers
Labelled analysis. The ruling is American, it binds nobody in Thailand, and Thai law is a separate question that a Thai lawyer would have to answer.
What travels is the evidentiary habit. Hostile link blasts are a known tactic in competitive Thai verticals, particularly around gambling adjacent sites, clinics and property. Site owners in those categories often notice a wave of strange referring domains and have no way to say when it began, because the only view they have is whatever their tool shows this week. Keeping dated exports and a dated disavow history costs almost nothing and is the one thing that cannot be reconstructed later.
The second point is temperamental. A case surviving a motion to dismiss will produce a round of content telling you that negative SEO is now provable and that you should panic about your backlink profile. It proves neither. Sudden spikes of low quality links are worth logging and worth watching. They are not worth abandoning a working link acquisition plan over.
FAQ: toxic backlinks and the Montway ruling
Did the court rule that Nexus AT sabotaged Montway?
No. The court ruled only that Montway had stated claims that are allowed to proceed. Judge Kennelly made no finding on whether the allegations are true and no finding that Nexus AT is liable. The 2 June 2026 decision was on a motion to dismiss, which is the stage before evidence is weighed.
Does this mean toxic backlinks damage rankings?
The ruling says nothing about that. It addressed whether the alleged conduct fits within false advertising and trademark law, not whether the links moved anything in search results. Search Engine Land's report does not quantify ranking damage either.
Should I disavow links because of this case?
Nothing in the ruling requires or recommends it. Google's disavow tool has existed as the standard route for telling Google to ignore specific links, and this decision does not change how it works or say anything about how well it works. Treat a disavow decision the way you did last month, and keep a dated copy of whatever you upload.
Does this apply in Thailand?
No. This is a United States federal district court applying United States law to a dispute between two American companies. Any Thai equivalent would be a separate question under Thai law. The transferable part is documentation, not the legal theory.
What is the single most useful thing to do today?
Take a dated backlink export and save it somewhere that is not the tool. The case turned on Montway being able to enumerate 2,350 links, their anchor text and the window they arrived in, and that kind of enumeration is only possible if the records already exist.
You can read the full write up at Search Engine Land.
If you want a second opinion on an unusual pattern in your referring domains, or a link programme that leaves a proper paper trail behind it, the team at Relevant Audience is happy to take a look.
