Negative SEO + Disavow

[ALLee]

My site is very new (~1 years old), but due to good PR we have gotten some decent links and are already ranking for a key term.

This may be why someone decided to start a negative SEO attack on us.

We've had less than 200 linking domains up until 2 weeks ago, but since then we have been getting 100+ new domains /day with anchor texts that are either targeted to that key term or are from porn websites.

I've gone through the links to get ready and submit a disavow... but should I do it?

My rankings/site traffic has not been affected yet.

Reasons for my hesitations:

1. Google always warns against using the disavow, and says "you shouldn't have to use it if you are a normal website." (sensing 'guilty-until-proven')

2. Some say Google is only trying to get the data to see if there are any patterns within the linking sites. I don't want the site owners to get hurt, since the villain is someone else using xrumer to put spammy comments on their site.

What would you do?

[ALLee]

Thanks everyone!

[TomKing]

This is also worth a read and watch the short video where you will get your answer from the 'horses mouth' (English term!)

http://searchengineland.com/googles-cutts-got-bad-links-to-your-site-dont-fret-it-disavow-it-169131

[MarieHaynes]

+1 to everything that Robert said.  I wanted to add this info from John Muller at a Webmaster Central Hangout. You can see the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEAQyHtRQxg and start watching at 23:30.

Someone asks John about a situation where a competitor is pointing thousands of spammy links at them a day.  John says that the algorithm is pretty good at ignoring those links but says that it may be a good idea to disavow them just in case.

One thing that I have found though is that a lot of people who think that they are under a negative SEO attack really just have a normal backlink profile.  Prior to Penguin, the average webmaster would not go through their links with the scrutiny that they utilize today.  You would be surprised of the kind of junk that is in the backlink profile of most sites, even if they have not done any link building!

[RobertFisher]

Alice,

Without more data and something visual it is hard to say what I would do. Are you sure the links are from 100 different domains a day? Versus 100 links from a domain or two? I am only asking for clarity sake.

If there is a way to give us a screenshot it would help. Short of that, I would say if you are not being affected yet, look in GWMT and see if the bad links are showing there yet. If they are not, that may be the reason. (With ahrefs for example, you will pick up the links long before Google does.) If it begins to affect performance, I would use the disavow tool to block them. I realize it is a lot of work, but I have seen a major client get hit by bad links and have helped them using the disavow tool.

What you are stating re the tool and Google's warning needs some balance - Google states that it can harm your site's performance. An example would be someone being over worried and they disavow 75% of their links, they are likely to fall in ranking.

As to: "you shouldn't have to use it if you are a normal website" is not a guilty until proven statement IMO. It is actually Google stating you should not just have use it willy nilly. This is from Google:

The disavow backlinks tool should be used with caution since it can potentially harm your site's performance. However, if you see a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links point to your site, and you're confident that the links are causing issues for your site, you can use the disavow tool to disavow those links. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool.

So, watch your WMT and the sites ranking and other performance measures. If you see an effect, do not be afraid to take action.

Hope this helps a bit.

Robert