Negative SEO impacting client rankings - How to combat negative linking?

[dancape]

I have a client which have been losing rankings for the key term "sell gold" in Google AU. However, while doing some investigating I realized that we have been receiving links from bad neighborhoods such as porn, bogus .edu sites as well as some pharmaceutical sites. We have identified this as negative SEO and have moved forward to disavow the links in Google. However, I would like to know what other measures can be taken to combat this type of negative SEO linking?

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

[TommyTan]

Hi Melanie,

If your competitor is doing Negative SEO to your site, I believe the only option is to use the Disavow Link Tool.  Pointing low-quality links to competitor's site is the most common method of Negative SEO and i believe that is one of the reason why Google rolled out the Disavow Tool.

If you are having trouble determining which links are low-quality, Matt Cutts recommends two ways:

1. Use the Webmaster Tool to sort the links by date and compare it to when you received the Unnatural Link Email from Google.  This help you determine which few links are unnatural comparing the date and time.

2. In the email that Google sends you, sometimes they try to include samples to give you an idea what is unnatural.

My 2 cents.

[eyepaq]

Hi,

Negative SEO is in effect only if you receive an un-natural message in Web master Tolls (so a manual penalty) or if you get an algo  filter applied (the only one for links si penguin).

So if you didn't receive any messages from google via Web master Tools and Penguin is not in effect - that means there is no current issue with Negative SEO - so the drop in rankings is not really from this bad links you are seeing.

There is one other possibility - when those bad links started to pop up you might have seen an increase in rankings  and traffic and and after some time google spot those bad links and cut them out (by cut them out I mean ignore those - they don't matter in your ranking process). if that was the case after the push up you wills ee a drop - to previous levels.

You can check that with a visibility tool to see if the patterns applies to you or post the url and some of us can have a look.

My 2 cents. Hope it helps.

[trickshotric]

Further to Heathers quite correct comments... You also have to keep an eye on the latest links tab in Google Webmaster Tools. It is also worth posting a reconsideration request as a preventative measure if there has been a large influx of spammy links.

[HeatherBakerTopLine]

Melanie, yesterday I watched a video by Matt Cutts explaining that the disavow tool is your best bet when it comes to combating negative SEO. It's frustrating though because it takes a bit of time to come into effect.

Good luck.

Heather