Negative SEO?
-
I have a large content site that's 8-9 yrs old, a PR4, DA of 66, and has many thousands of backlinks. It has ranked well for it's primary keywords for quite some time. This morning I noticed rankings dropped significantly. My #2 keyword went from 1 to 150.
I started trying to figure out what was up and when I signed into GWT I had the notice from Google on 2/25 that they noticed un-natural linking tactics. Hmm....weird...I dont use un-natural linking methods.
So I pulled open a couple back link analyzing tools and when looking at Majestic SEO I noticed that about mid February I had a spike of about 2500-3000 links coming from roughly 350 unique domains. Hmm..weird..We hadn't been doing any major content marketing or link building during that time or for probably a month to month and half before that.
Upon analyzing some of those links it appears that a vast majority of them are from some type of blog network. Not sure which but you know the kind I'm talking about. ALN or something similar.
What appears to have happened is someone pointed a bunch of spammy links at my site and this has caused Google to penalize me. I know this isn't suppose to be possible but just recently on a forum I visit I noticed a thread where someone was able to successfully do this to his competitor who has held the number one spot for over a year. He used the same technique of a couple hundred blog network links with varied anchor text and his competitor dropped about a hundred spots.
So curious if anyone else has seen this or has any advice on my next step. I have filed a re-inclusion request and outlined what I think happened. I am also attempting to figure out which blog network it is so that I can request they remove those links but if I can't I'm not sure what I should do next.
-
I think it is unlikely that some effective Negative SEO has been performed and had an effect on your site rankings so quickly. The movements you are experiencing are more likely related to:
-
Your site was linked to from a network which increased pagerank but these links are no longer of any value and so this has reduced the incoming link value to your site.
-
The significant reduction of backlink quantity in a short period has caused a ripple in your SERPS score, this will eventually even out as more time passes.
So there are two things affecting your short term SERPS position and this will become less significant as time passes and these events become more distant.
No doubt it is upsetting to find such a move however with the rollout out of Panda 3.4 (and other algo changes) everyone can expect movement in some way or another.
While you await your appropriate SERPS positions to return, proceed to focus your efforts on building good unique content, knowing that visitor activity on your site is being evaluated and by providing a great experience to your visitors you will find that your are doing exactly what Google is looking for.
-
-
Yes - if the pages/links are gone, they will get discounted - it just takes time. If they all came to one page and that page is non-essential, you could temporarily NOINDEX it until the bad links clear up. Depending on the page, though, that's a bit drastic. That's really the only way to cut a link from the receiving end.
-
I have appealed to Google. We'll see what happens but it sounds like people typically dont really have much luck in this process. Link building has been above board so they're free to peak in our closet as you put it
I've begun going through the 700+ blog network links. It appears they all came into one page on our site. It also appears that a large percentage (not sure exactly what %) are no longer there. It looks like the blogs have either been removed completely or all content on them have been removed. Must be on of the big networks that's been discovered as of late.
Do you think this will help as a large number of "spammy" links are now gone?
-
They link Corey cites has some good information - I think Matt Cutts' quote is dead on - it's unlikely to be harmed this way, but it's not impossible. I've seen 2 cases in the last year where we ruled out just about everything else and a very aggressive attempt by a competitor seemed to do damage.
So, how do you fix it? Unfortunately, there's no good way to cut a link you don't want, except to cut the page being linked to. Quite often, that's the home-page, unfortunately. I wrote about this in some detail last year:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-ways-to-recover-from-bad-links
In most cases, I'd recommend (1) Wait it out, or (5) Appeal to Google (see the post). Many times, these links are clearly unnatural and built up quickly, and Google will recognize and devalue them appropriately. It might just take them a little time. If they don't you can file for reconsideration.
If you file for reconsideration, explain the problem in detail and provide data. It really adds to your case. Also, be sure that you've cleaned house. If you file for reconsideration for this competitive attack, but then you have 50 paid links, you might be opening a closet you don't want Google to peek into.
-
Hi Jmacek07, I would like to tell you about the Neagtive SEO.
It is the black hat seo technique used to attack a website.
Negative SEO sometimes get penalized in SERPS or it results in sometimes banned the website which will may affects the target website by search engines.
As you already know that these Negative SEO techniques mostly used by the new & small organization because it would leads to higher in ranking without doing any hard work.But we should know that when negative seo is most effective.
Today negative seo are being very common because neagtive seo does'nt needs too much efforts,hardwork to increase the rank of a particular websites.
For more details please check the Becoming Common -Negative SEO
I hope that your query had been solved.
-
Guys at LinkBuildr wrote the most comprehensive post about this (that I've seen) in October including tons of links to other articles about this.
http://www.linkbuildr.com/google-link-penalties-seo-sabotage-and-the-great-link-conspiracy/
Good luck.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
On page vs Off page vs Technical SEO: Priority, easy to handle, easy to measure.
Hi community, I am just trying to figure out which can be priority in on page, off page and technical SEO. Which one you prefer to go first? Which one is easy to handle? Which one is easy to measure? Your opinions and suggestions please. Expecting more realistic answers rather than usual check list. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
SEO experiments
Hello All, I would appreciate if you could share with me your insight and advise on how to run SEO and UX experiments. How do we set up the proper benchmark and control groups, what tools to use? How can we ensure that the changes we see are not due to other factors and what difference is needed to confirm our findings? Some of the things I would like to test is if certain words in the title tag can correlate with higher CTR or with lower bounce rates. I would also like to quickly test if the common best practices only 1 h1 etc have any effect on rankings at all. Please share with me from knowledge and experience. Thanks Much!
Algorithm Updates | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
ATTN SEO MINDS: Is there a way/tool to categorize keywords from an Omniture/GA report?
So ideally I would like to take the list of keywords I am currently ranking for, and group these based on what the user intent was in making that query. For example if I am a Thai delivery chain and I am currently receiving traffic from the queries "vegan dish" and "tofu thai food", I would want to have a column in a keyword report that says these queries fall into the VEGETARIAN category. I think what I want to know is how can I filter a massive list by a range of keywords? I want to know does this cell contain, "keyword A" or "keyword B" or "keyword Z". If so list the corresponding category. This way I can look at keyword performance by category or user intent/motivation. Is there a tool out there that will help me accomplish this, or is there a good solution in excel I can use?
Algorithm Updates | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
What's better for seo, NOINDEX, or INDEX
Hello Mozers; I am having an issue, my client has 10K pages on their site; in WP, and they have a classified section. Question #1: I am asking, what's better for seo, NOINDEX, or INDEX, for their Classified section. They currently have no SEO plug ins, that fix their errors, and warnings. Question #2: My question is also, do I want the Categories crawled, or INDEXED or NOINDEX? Check out their Campaign results by Moz: Title Element Too Long (> 70 Characters) 32 Too Many On-Page Links 9,032 Missing Meta Description Tag 6,234
Algorithm Updates | | smstv0 -
The Impact of Attribute REV in SEO
Hi, I'm looking for information about rev="" attribute in SEO. What do this attribute communicate to search robots? Does it Impacts in the positioning of pages / keywords? Does anyone have information that could help me?
Algorithm Updates | | webg0 -
Pdfs for SEO - benefits, downfalls and promotional methods
Hi fellow Mozzers, We're just in the middle of relaunching our website (a design agency), and I had a few questions re: SEO of our service keywords. The designers want the site to seem light on content, despite my advice that this would reduce the terms we can rank for. With that in mind, I was going to include advice pages that can be found via the site map, site search or text links but aren't promoted via the top level or second level nav. Another alternative I was going to explore was using pdfs for design case studies, so the site would feature a light case study, but with a more in-depth pdf available if wanted. I have located numerous articles highlighting how best to optimise pdfs, but I have a few queries aside from the technical standpoint. So: is this the best way to getting round the issue of keeping the site 'light' on content? are there stats that show CTRs on pdf pages over HTML? as well as optimising the pdf content and promoting them on our social media channel, is there a benefit from including them on the likes of Scribd, Edocr and so on (from either an SEO or simply from a promotional viewpoint, or both) Hopefully that's all clear! Nick
Algorithm Updates | | themegroup0 -
Non .Com or .Co Versus .ca or .fm sites - In terms of SEO value
We are launching a new site with a non traditional top level domain . We were looking at either .ca or .in as we are not able to get the traditional .com or .co or .net etc . I was wondering if this has any SEO effect ? Does Google/Bing treat this domain differently .Will it be penalized ? Note : My site is a US based site targeting US audience
Algorithm Updates | | Chaits0 -
SinglePlatform's Restaurant Menu Across Web Properties vs "SEO-Optimized"
Surprised I wasn't able to find an existing answer given that SinglePlatform apparently serves 500,000 SMBs with menus that appear on over 150 publisher websites. Given Panda's razor-sharp intolerance for duplicate content, am I safe to assume that any claim of SinglePlatform's menu on a local restaurant being beneficial to your SEO is now spurious? If so, what's best way to handle this as a potential SEO liability while still having one of their nicely formatted restaurant menus on your site? For reference: http://www.openforum.com/articles/using-singleplatform-to-build-a-digital-presence Update May 7, 2012 Connected directly with the folks at SinglePlatform, and the answer here is a lot simpler than my over-thinking of it. The menu usually sits within an iFrame or widget so that's that. But the ability to truthfully show an up-to-date menu for any given establishment is a legit way to address the healthy amount of local search intent that seems to be directed at exactly that. Overall a pretty slick platform, looking forward to seeing how they grow into the SMB, local & mobile in the coming months, I think the space is ripe to benefit from products/services that take advantage of these sorts of economies of scale.
Algorithm Updates | | mgalica0