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
-
SEO: High intent organic revenue down in Europe
Our team is stumped and we are hoping some of you might have some insight! We are seeing a drop in Europe organic revenue and we can't seem to figure out what the core cause of the problem is. What's interesting, the high intent traffic is increasing across the business, as is organic-attributed revenue. And in Europe specifically, other channels appear to be doing just fine. This seems to be a Europe high-intent SEO problem. What we have established: Revenue was at a peak in Q4 2017 and Q1 2018 Revenue dips in mid-late Q2 2018 and again in Q4 2018 where it has stayed low since Organic traffic has gone up, conversion rate has gone down, purchases have gone down Paid search traffic has gone up, conversion rate has gone down slightly, submissions have gone up Currency changes are minimal We cannot find any site load issues What we know happened during this time frame (January 2018 onward): Updates to the website (homepage layout, some text changes) end of April 2018 GDPR end of May 2018 Google Analytics stops being able to track Firefox Europe is a key market for us and we cant figure out what might be causing this to happen - again, only in Europe - beyond GDPR and the changes we've made on our site is there anything else major that we're missing that could be causing this? Or does anyone have any insights as to where we should look? Thank you in advance!
Algorithm Updates | | RS-Marketing0 -
Does personalization that changes meta data display in SERPs impact SEO?
My company has been rolling out personalization at the page level across our site using behavior paths embedding content from cross pathed pages as well as customer journey mapping. The dynamically generated content doesn’t change the URLs. In the SERPs I’m seeing that our title tags and meta descriptions also seem to be dynamically generated even though we have these elements crafted. The way our elements are crafted: Title tag: descriptive Keyword rich phrase | Brand Meta description: Keyword rich, grammatically correct description tied to title tag and page content for consistency. I search a specific URL: Title tag display: Keyword rich phrase | Brand – Brand Meta description display: Random content pulled from the page I search a phrase that includes Brand + keywords in the URL: Title tag display: Title tag we crafted Meta description display: Meta description we crafted I search a phrase that includes Brand + keywords in the title tag: Title tag display: Title tag we crafted Meta description display: Random content pulled from the page Does Google crawl the page and digest the title tag and meta description we crafted? Or is Google going to ding us for having the brand twice, exceeding the length of the title tag, etc.? I have been searching the interwebs, forums and the cosmos, but the only information I’m finding is related to the fact that URLs are changing and how that would impact SEO. That’s not the case for us. Thoughts on how all this is impacting our SEO efforts?
Algorithm Updates | | NStarJM0 -
SEO Benchmarks for Healthcare Vertical
Hey All, I have a healthcare client that is particularly interested in benchmarking their organic traffic and other organic KPIs against the industry as a whole. Does anyone know of any great resources that show SEO benchmarks broken out by vertical? Thank you! Rachael
Algorithm Updates | | FullMedia901 -
What is your experience with markups (schema.org) in terms of SEO and best practice learnings?
Hi, I am looking to implement schema markups into a variety of websites and currently wondering about best practices. I am working on energy providers, building material, e-retailers, social association among others. While I understand every single one of these is an individual case, I could do with some advices from you, guys. Which markups would you consider key for search engines? I would have naturally chosen markups to highlight the business name, location and products but there is so much more to schema.org! Thanks,
Algorithm Updates | | A_Q0 -
Impact of recent On Page Optimisation changes had negative impact !
Hi I recently updated some page titles, H1 tags & on page content which overall has seen search results slip down following the first site crawl by google I assume. My question is, should I try to get back the rankings and test and change one thing at a time to see the impact right now or should i wait for a period of time for it to settle down once goggle has crawled the site a few times or will the subsequent crawls have no impact? Thanks Ash
Algorithm Updates | | AshShep10 -
SEO having different effects for different sites
Hi, I hope this isn't a dumb question, but I was asked by a local company to have a look at their website and make any suggestions on how to strengthen and improve their rankings. After time spent researching their competitors, and analysing their own website I was able to determine that they are actually in a good position. The have a well structured site that follows the basic search rules, they add new relevant content regularly and are working on their social strategy. Most of their pages are rated A within Moz, and they spend a lot of time tweaking the site. When I presented this to them, they asked why there are sites that rank above them that don't seem to take as much care over their website. For example, one of their main competitors doesn't engage in any social networking, and rarely adds content to their site. I was just wondering if anyone could shed any light on why this happens? I appreciate there's probably no simple answer, but it would be great to hear some different input. Many thanks
Algorithm Updates | | dantemple880 -
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 -
What are the good strategies using satellite sites in SEO??
Hello to everybody, We'are thinking about launching a massive amount of satellite websites in order to promote our website. Is it really efficient in terms of link building? Or is the ROI really small due to the amount of time and money needed to create and manage these websites? Thanks a lot!!! Update: Thanks to all of you for all these interesting answers!
Algorithm Updates | | sarenausa1