Victim of negative SEO, but will this be believed if the client has not always been whiter than white?
-
A new client has come to me because they have found themselves in hot water with Google having received a manual spam action for unnatural inbound links.
The sad case in this story is that I completely believe that the client has been a victim of an attack by a competitor. They finally made it onto page 1 in their competitive niche, and within a few days random links started appearing on spammy sites (often foreign language sites.) By the time the message came from Google about 2 weeks later several thousand of these links had been built.
The first stage was to get the client to be very honest with me about anything he personally had done that might be considered manipulative. Unfortunately following some bad advice several months ago the client purchased one site-wide link (already in the process of removing it.) The same company that gave him this advice also built just under 100 links to his website (over the course of a couple of days) in early December.
So - we know the client hasn't been whiter than white, and we are going to undo anything that he had responsibility for asap. We are also working to ensure that he is earning really high quality links in the right way (already have some great press coverage in the pipeline and are working on unique content.)
My question is - given some past mistakes made by the client - is there any way that we credibly get across the fact that this recent huge volume of spam is absolutely nothing to do with him in a reconsideration request? Of course we can start work on removing these links and can disavow anything we can't remove - but my expectation is that should this be successful the same competitor is going to continue throwing spam links at my client.
I appreciate that previous actions by the client would in themselves have been worthy of a manual spam action - but it seems far too much of a coincidence given the timing if this penalty was unrelated to the recent attack.
I'd really appreciate any insights from the Moz community and will look forward to sharing our eventual success story as a YouMoz post!
Tom
-
In light of the fact that the client admitted that he recently paid for building spam links, it is more likely that the links being attributed to a negative SEO campaign were actually purchased by the client himself (knowingly or unknowingly) and that they are just recently taking effect.
Nonetheless, in your reconsideration request, be clear about differentiating what links the client attributes to that SEO firm's efforts and the links are attributed to the negative SEO effort, which are continuing to show up. Treat them as separate issues in the same reconsideration request. Start out with something like "We have two issues going on--the client hired an SEO firm that built links from these specific domains [domain 1, domain 2, domain 3,....] but we also have these other links that are accruing from what is believed to be negative SEO and which we are disavowing as they show up...." and then explain your outreach process for the links attributable to the client. If that doesn't work, there's always the option to drop another reconsideration request with a different tactic.
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
-
Backlink Transparency with SEO Agency
Hello everyone. I recently started working with an SEO agency and today they gave me an updated keyword report which showed some increase in rankings. I was not aware that any backlinks had been created yet so I asked for a report of the links. Their response is below and I am just wondering if this is normal practice being I have not worked with any type of SEO agency yet. "
Link Building | | wonderd24
Hey Daniel, We release a small report on them which the guest blog team will do soon. We don't reveal all backlink sources unfortunately because people have tried to bother the webmasters we have and basically steal our techniques. But rest assured you will be ranking at the top of the pack with our methods 😃
"1 -
Is there an extra SEO benefit for linking to pages that link to you?
Currently working on a link-building strategy and have gotten a few mentions. Just curious if there is any SEO benefits of linking back to the pages my site was mentioned and linked on? Would love to hear your thoughts, thanks!
Link Building | | Derrald0 -
Seo For Amazon!
I have been working on seo for amazon and was wondering if anyone in the community can share some tips with me around seo for amazon products?
Link Building | | DavidKonigsberg1 -
Affiliate Links & SEO
Hi Looking at my backlink profile I noticed that I had 150 links coming from one site. Ahhhh I thought in light if the recent Penguin updates. Upon closer inspection I noticed that my link is only on the homepage of that site but because that site sells its product via clickbank they have got loads of versions of that site because of its affiliates. For example: MAINSITE is www.mainsite.com then there are 150 affiliates using hoplinks via clickbank so its: www.mainsite.com?hopmrbig www.mainsite.com?blablahblah etc etc The question: Will this hurt me? In theory I got 1 link on their homepage but will Google see it as 150 versions of the same site? Your thoughts please? SMP
Link Building | | intmarkacademy0 -
Could I be the victim of negative SEO?
While I was searching for bad links to one of my website, I realized that there were lots of backlinks from trackbacks on various blogs. Most of these trackback links are definitely spammy as they are not relevant with the blog topics and they use exact anchor text. The thing is that I am 300% sure that it has nothing to do with any SEO campaign services I've bought in the past. They link back to pages I've never optimized at all. So could I be the victim of a negative SEO campaign? What do you think?
Link Building | | sbrault740 -
SEO value in Twitter bit.ly links?
When I use opensiteexplorer for my webpage www.novelaspect.com and go under the "linking domains" tab, there is only 1 Twitter link that shows up. However, my competitors have multiple Twitter links. I've posted many many times on Twitter and linked the posts back to our website, but I've always used bitly to shorten the URLs. Is this what's keeping me from getting more backlinks from Twitter (which has a high domain authority!)? I haven't been able to find a straight answer anywhere yet, so I assumed using bitly is ok. Could it also be that opensiteexplorer takes months to register links? I seem to be missing many external links...In fact, the number of external links have dropped by around 10,000 in the past 2 months, and I know I didn't remove any links. Thanks!
Link Building | | Novelaspect0 -
LinkedIn SEO boost?
Should I create a LinkedIn page for my website? We teach english lessons by skype and I am not sure if it is worth it to create a company on LinkedIn and link to it from my site? Will that get me some good SEO points? Additionally I don't want to fork over 20$ to LinkedIn if I don't have to. Thank you dudes!
Link Building | | Blobe0 -
Utilizing Print Media for SEO
Hey SEO MOZ, We have a client that holds the license to a famous Australian designer. The Designer and our client both get mentioned a lot in the print world. They get coverage in publications like the New York Times, Home and Garden Magazine and other top print media publications. Sometimes it's our clients business name mentioned and sometimes it's the designer's name who they hold the rights too. I'm wondering how we can utilize this exposure for their SEO? It already drives traffic to their website but it also be great to harness this exposure to increase their rankings. I know one way is to see if the article is also printed online and see if you can get a link on their. But I'm wondering if there are other ways to use this? Also do you have experience contacting major publications to see if they can put a link in an online published article and if they ever respond to these requests? Really appreciate this!
Link Building | | TWSOM0