Negative SEO?

[jmacek07]

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.

[ebmocwen]

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

[Dr-Pete]

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.

[jmacek07]

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?

[Dr-Pete]

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.

[mediabase]

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.

[CoreyEulas]

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.