Black Hat Attack! Seeking Help
-
Hello,
For the first time, I think my site has been the victim of a black hat (spam) attack
I have a blog in a competitive niche and my rankings suddenly dropped (from top 3 to top 20). A quick peek at my latest backlinks using Open Site Explorer "Just Discovered" revealed some nasty looking comment spam links with my target keywords posted recently.
Of course, I haven't hired anyone to post such links and I haven't done it myself. So my only guess is that a competitor has been generous enough to invest on spamming my site.
Questions:
1. How can I confirm if this is in fact a spam attack?
2. Should I worry about this?
3. If so, what is the best way to go about this?
Would appreciate any thoughts on this.
Thanks in advance!
Howard
-
Thanks so much! I'll have a look at issues with respect to the Panda update and I'll see if I find anything there.
-
Oh, and I wanted to add info on my other traffic drop audit client who had the mystery nofollowed anchor texted links pointing to their site. Their traffic drop ended up being because of abuse of the local listing. At this point I don't think that the mystery links were significant. But, if anyone else knows why these would appear, I'd love to hear it.
-
The blog comment links on the page you mentioned are nofollowed so these really shouldn't harm your site.
I had a client recently that had a pile of mystery nofollowed links that had their keyword as anchor text and I really couldn't figure out where they came from. When I looked at the links to their site sorted by only followed links there were no unusual ones there. I never did figure out where they came from.
The way I understand it, if someone was trying to negative SEO you then any possible penalty would not affect your site until either Penguin refreshes or until Google does a manual review of the site. In your case, Penguin has not refreshed since October so this is not the issue. You would know if you had a manual penalty because you would have a warning in WMT. btw...there's no point filing for reconsideration if you don't have a manual warning in WMT.
If your drop happened at that time in March I would have a very close look for Panda issues on your site as this is more likely in my mind.
I suppose there is probably no harm in disavowing the links as long as you are comfortable with what you are doing with the disavow tool. But I would be surprised if it would make any difference.
-
Thanks for your suggestion. The site owners could probably care less about removing those links but I'll definitely use the disavow tool followed by a reconsideration request.
-
Care to share any of the nasty links? In my experience the vast majority of the time when someone thinks they have been negatively SEO'd they are either seeing just regular normal scraper type sites that link to EVERYONE such as SEO profile sites or domain info sites, or they are seeing links that are the result of previous spammy linkbuilding tactics. An example of this could be if you submitted your site to a spammy directory and then all of a sudden that directory gets scraped by several other directories and boom...you've got a pile of links that you didn't personally create.
I would think that it's unlikely that a drop from top 3 to top 20 at this point would be because of a negative SEO campaign because in order for you to be penalized for bad links there would have had to have been a Penguin refresh (which there wasn't) or you would have received a manual spam warning in WMT.
If the drop happened around Mar 13-15 then there was a Panda refresh around that time, so that could be it.
-
Hi Howard, I think the best thing is to prioritize and contact all the sites in bulk to have those comments removed. If they don't answer disavow those urls, Then write arecon request to google to ask them to remove any penalty they put upon you because you were victim of some kind of negative seo attack. After having your rankings fixed try to understand from where that attack may be arrived although I don't think you'll find anything since the attack wasn't on your site
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
-
Seeking Top Notch Marketing Company with experience in growing sites post manual penalty
Does anyone know of a company who has direct experience with growing websites AFTER a manual link penalty has been lifted? Any referrals would be great!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Black linking exploitation
Hi all After watching our ranking for some primary keywords drop on Google from page 1 to 20 and then totally off the charts in relatively short period I've recently discovered through moz tools that our website along with other competitor sites are victims to black linking (may have the terminology wrong). Two primary words are anchor linked to our domain (www.solargain.com.au) being sex & b$tch through over 4000 compromised sites - mostly Wordpress - many which are high profile sites. Searching through the source code through half a dozen compromised sites I noticed that competitors are also linked using other derogatory terms, but the patterns indicate batch or clustered processing. The hacker has left some evidence as to whom they are representing as I can see some credible discussion forums which contain negative feedback on one particular supplier also among the links. Although this is pretty good evidence to why our ranking has dropped there are some interesting questions: A) is there any way to rectify the 4000 or so black links, mass removal or other. (Doesn't sound feasible)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mannydog
B) some competitors who dominate organic ranking through better optimization don't seem to be affected or apparently affected as much as our site at least. Which questions how much we are affected as a direct result from this hack.
C) is there action or support for industrial espionage?
D) can you request from google to ignore the inbound links and would they not have a duty of care to do so? I'm fairly new to this ugly side of the Internet and would like to know how to approach recovery and moving forward. Thoughts ideas very welcome. Thanks in advance.0 -
Two plus two equals four! Grey hat alive and well
Rand is unquestionably much smarter than I however his pronouncements concerning the link building don't seem to hold true for some sectors of the online marketplace. We sell upholstery leather and one of our main competitor runs the table with the most important search terms and has a total garbage backlink profile. I don't know if there is some onsite magic they are working but they don't use brand name anchor text, links are not relevant to their products and most of their links are from high DA blogs, craps posts to .edu forums and no follow. The point is, maybe black hat is out but a lot of what I see being rewarded out there suggests grey hat is alive and well.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | leatherhidestore0 -
Please help? unique penguin problem with a blogger template
**Can any one help? The problem: **There is a free blogger template on this site http://btemplates.com/2012/blogger-template-crystalweb/ that has a anchor text link to our site using the keyword "wholesale" in the footer, that is the main course of our site being hit with a penguin penalty.**The story so far:**On the 24th April our website dropped out of the serps for our main keywords, traffic has been down 90% ever since, we are a small family run business that relies on the inter-net and goggle for our site to work. Goggle organic serps is about 30% of our turnover and have already had no choice to let 3 people go, problem now is we are left with Me, my Dad and Mum, Both my Brothers and nephew and my wife and my brothers wife so unless we can turn this around I can see us going bankrupt.**What I have done so far:**After the 24th I have learnt a lot about S.E.O , and managed to remove 99% of all bad/spammy links and have now come to a dead end. I have been promoting what we do as a company and promoting our blog over the last 4 months and also built a great twitter/facebook following with lots of re-tweets and shares which we have made some good sales from. We have re-designed most parts of our website and managed to up the conversion rate by 300% We have worked on all aspects of our website to make sure we have little/no duplicate content , have worked on ways to speed up the site and fixed most dead links/404 problems.<var id="yiv904548185yui-ie-cursor"></var>**Now onto our main problem:**After a few weeks of removing links I found a blogger page that kept coming up with the same link, after some detective work I found the template was originally designed by http://www.deluxetemplates.com/ after a few emails we found out that someone paid deluxetemplates to add the link to the site, I'm guessing it was a S.E.O. company we used for 2 years, but they did not admit to this and could not help. A guy called Klodian from deluxtemplates was really helpful and helped remove from his site, also he agreed to a cost of $250 to remove all the pictures on his server to force the blogger's to update, this is what the template from deluxtemplates now looks like vozconuncion.blogspot.co.uk .Now this was only helping fix this issue a small bit as a different site called btemplates also used the template and added it to there website as a free download and hosted the template pictures on there servers. I have emailed a few times, I have sent them twitter messages and also added messages to lots of there templates on there site in the hope they can help, I have also contacted the owner directly on his goggle+1 page but no reply. This template is being downloaded once or twice a day, with no way to get hold of the blogger's using it. As a last resort I offered the owner $1000 to help me remove the template but still no luck.Does anyone have any ideas how to resolve? we are willing to pay to resolve this and will do what ever needs to be done.Thank-you for taking the time to read.Karl.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wcuk0 -
White Hat/Black Hat: Incentivized SEO Competition?
General Idea: Rules: The winner is the person who ranks highest for "Random Easy to Rank for Key Phrase" Prize: Some cool prize White or Black hat?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LaunchAStartup0 -
Turn grey myself or rat on black hat competitors?
When being trashed by a less than white competitor what do you find most effective: lie down with your feet in the air considering a career in gardening? turn grey yourself? rat on them to Google? Phil
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Phil_1 -
HELP! My client got a DDOS Attack! Need advice
Here the setup: Server is hosted inhouse. It got attacked using a DDOS from 20+ IP addresses spoofing in different counries. Our server overloaded and didn't work anymore. URL is registered at GoDaddy. Signed up at Dreamhost. We pointed DNS to Dreamhost successfully. Attacks kept coming and messed up other sites on the Dreamhost shared server. We didn't know we were being followed at first. We originally thought they were attacking the IP address on our inhouse server. Dreamhost noticed the attack and put us on a seperate IP and disabled our URL until the attacks 'stopped'. MY QUESTION IS: What do I do if they don't stop? Close shop? 99% of the business is internet driven. This has to be the blackest Blackhat SEO ever.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Francisco_Meza0