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
-
Does linking older posts help?
Asking a blogger to add an anchor text into their old post that relates to my niche. does that help with backlinks? does the quality of backlinks determine by how new the post is or the page rank determines all? for example a new post with lesser page rank vs a old post with higher page rank which one is better to put your link on?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andzon0 -
Do rss feeds help seo in 2013?
I have seen answers for this back in 2012 but as we all now things have changed in 2013. My question is Do rss feeds help seo in 2013? Or does google see it as duplicate content (I see that the moz site has RSS ...)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Llanero0 -
External Followed Links Over Time Nasty Drop HELP!
I had someone help me with SEO and they basically used some stupid form to get back-links I am still learning and have taken over my site to better do things right. I have had a major drop across the board since Panda and Pinguin and rightfully so from what I am seeing. My question is: Google obviously removed the backlinks and SEO MOZ shows this in its report. Do I need to disavow these links still or can I just focus on link building properly? What is the best course of action here? gGuSyJf
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | megapixall0 -
HELP - Site architecture of E-Commerce Mega Menu - Linkjuice flow
Hi everyone, I hope you have a couple of mins to give me your opinion. Ecommerce site has around 2000 products, in english and spanish, and around only 70 hits per day if that. We have done a lot of optimisation on the site - Page Titles, URL's, Content, H1's, etc.... Everything on page is pretty much under control, except I am starting to realise the site architecture could be harming our SEO efforts. Once someone arrives on site they are language detected and do a 302 to either domain.com/EN or domain.com/ES depending on their preferred language. Then on the homepage, we have the big MEGA MENU - and we have
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs2010
CAT 1
SubCat 1
SubsubCat 1
SubsubCat 2
SubsubCat 3 Overall, there are 145 "categories". Plus links to some CMS pages, like Home, Delivery terms, etc... Each Main Category, contains the products of everything related to that category - so for example:
KITCHENWARE
COOKWARE BAKINWARE
SAUCEPANS BOWLS
FRYING PANS Kitchenware contains: ALL PRODUCTS OF SUBCATS BELOW, SO COOKWARE ITEMS, SAUCEPANS, FRYING PANS, BAKINGWARE, etc... plus links to those categories through breadcrumbs and a left hand nav in addition to the mega menu above. So once the bots hit the site, immediately they have this structure to deal with. Here is what stats look like:
Domain Authority: 18 www.domain.com/EN/
PA: 27
mR: 3.99
mT: 4.90 www.domain.com/EN/CAT 1
PA: 15
mR: 3.05
mT: 4.54 www.domain.com/EN/CAT 1/SUBCAT1
PA: 15
mR: 3.05
mT: 4.54 Product pages themselves - have a PA of 1 and no mR or mT. I really need some other opinions here - I am thinking of: Removing links in Nav menu so it only contains CAT1 and SUBCAT1 but DELETE SUBSUBCATS1 which represent around 80 links Remove products within the CAT1 page - eg., the CAT 1 would "tile" graphical links to subcategories, but not display products themselves. So products are only available right at the lowest part of the chain (which will be shortened) But I am willing to hear any other ideas please - maybe another alternative is to start building links to boost DA and linkjuice? Thanks all, Ben0 -
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 -
Will cleaning up old pr articles help serps?
For a few years we published articles with anchor text backlinks to about 10 different article submission sites. Each article was modified to create similar different articles. We have about 50 completely unique articles. This worked really well for our serps until google panda & penguin updates. I am looking for advice on whether I should have a major clean up of the published articles and if so should I be deleting them, removing or renaming anchor text backlinks? Any advice on what strategy would work best would be appreciated as I don't want to start deleting backlinks and making it worse. We used to enjoy position 1 but are now at 12-15 so have least most of our traffic.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | devoted2vintage0 -
Are paid reviews gray/black hat?
Are sites like ReviewMe or PayPerPost white hat? Are follow links allowed within the post? Should I use those aforementioned services, or cold contact high authority sites within my niche?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 10JQKAs0 -
NYT article on JC Penny's black hat campaign
Saw this article on JC Penny receiving a 'manual adjustment' to drop their rankings by 50+ spots: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html Curious what you guys think they did wrong, and whether or not you are aware of their SEO firm SearchDex? I mean, was it a simple case of low-quality spam links or was there more to it? Anyone study them in OpenSiteExplorer?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | scanlin0