Black Hat Attack! Seeking Help

[howardd]

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

[howardd]

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.

[MarieHaynes]

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.

[MarieHaynes]

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.

[howardd]

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.

[MarieHaynes]

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.

[mememax]

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