Negative SEO attack working amazingly on Google.ca
-
We have a client www.atvandtrailersales.com who recently (March) fell out of the rankings. We checked their backlink file and found over 100 spam links pointing at their website with terms like "uggboots" and "headwear" etc. etc.
I submitted a disavow link file, as this was obviously an attack on the website.
Since the recent Panda update, the client is back out of the rankings for a majority of keyword phrases. The disavow link file that was submitted back in march has 90% of the same links that are still spamming the website now.
I've sent a spam report to Google and nothing has happened. I could submit a new disavow link file, but I'm not sure if this is worth the time.
'.'< --Thanks!
-
Thank you for that, i will have a look now. I know when we have looked at our links we have found a lot of people link to our site, but trying to decide if these are good links or bad links has been hard for us.
We did find a lot of directory sites and also game sites that were linking to us and we could not understand why they were doing this.
-
Zack,
They're actually linking to a dynamic inventory page which is updated daily with new products. Sometimes they link to a specific piece of inventory which is ultimately 404'd when the product is sold and link doesn't exist anymore.
Wish it was that easy, but the links keep coming
-
Hi Tim,
If you log into webmaster tools and look at Traffic > Links to your site you can see who's linking. Make sure you click on "More>>". Alternatively you can use Moz's OSE and run a backlink report on your site.
It was immediately clear that this was happening again as we had 26 links from videogamersoasis.com for a power sports website...
To submit a file:
Webmaster Tools > Traffic > Links to your site, click on "Download latest links" and then filter out any links you actually put there. Go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1 and submit the file.
Only do this is you KNOW you've been attacked and you can't contact the website owners to take the links down.
-
i think the same is happening to our site, can you let me know how you find the spamy link and how to submit the file. also have you tried filling in the contact form for google, i know they are not great at communicating but maybe worth a shot
-
That sucks. If I were you I would probably would not submit a new disavow link file, because the first one is probably still in their queue.
How many different URLs were the spammy links pointing to ? If it's just a few, could you just no-index the tainted goods and create new URLs ?
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 google sandbox aged domains too?
Hello, i have a question. Recently i bought a domain from godaddy auction which is 23 years old and have DA 37 PA 34 Before bidding i check out the domain on google using this query to make sure if pages of this website are showing or not (site:mydomain.com) only home page was indexed on google. Further i check the domain on archive web the domain was last active in 2015. And then it parked for long about 4 years. So now my question does google consider these type of domain as new or will sandboxed them if i try to rebuild them and rank for other niche keywords ? Because its been 4 weeks i have been building links to my domain send several profile and social signals to my domain. My post is indexed on google but not showing in any google serp result.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Steven231 -
Hacked Websites (Doorways) Ranking First Page of Google
Hello Moz community! I could really use your help with some suggestions here with some recent changes I've noticed in the Google serps for terms I've been currently working on. Currently one of the projects I am working on is for an online pharmacy and noticed that the SERPs are being now taken up by hacked websites which look like doorways to 301 redirect to an online pharmacy the hacker wants the traffic to go to. Seems like they may be wordpress sites that are hacked and have unrelated content on their websites compared to online pharmacies. We've submitted these issues as spam to Google and within chrome as well but haven't heard back. When searching terms like "Canadian Pharmacy Viagra" and other similar terms we see this issue. Any other recommendations on how we can fix this issue? Thanks for your time and attached is a screenshot of the results we are seeing for one of our searches. 1Orus
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | monarkg0 -
Google Answer Box Optimization?
Anyone have any luck in optimizing your site to show up in the Google Answer Boxes that popup for informational queries? (for example: "what is seo?") I've read many of the articles that have been written on the subject, and have been able to show up for many queries by a) ranking high organically, b) placing the question at the top of the page, and then answering it succinctly. However, for one term a competitor continues to show up in the answer box instead of us, despite their site ranking lower organically in the search results. Anyone have any experience/advice for replacing a competitor in the Answer Box? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TakeshiYoung2 -
By changing the wordpress theme what need to take for seo consideration?
Hi guys! we have a site that been using a theme for a year now and we decided to change to a new one, the question here is, does it affect seo? or it is possible to remain 100% for the seo? What caution tips that you guys can share for changing the theme? Does just remaining the same URL works?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andrewwatson922 -
Forcing Google to Crawl a Backlink URL
I was surprised that I couldn't find much info on this topic, considering that Googlebot must crawl a backlink url in order to process a disavow request (ie Penguin recovery and reconsideration requests). My trouble is that we recently received a great backlink from a buried page on a .gov domain and the page has yet to be crawled after 4 months. What is the best way to nudge Googlebot into crawling the url and discovering our link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Choice0 -
Is this a clear sign that one of our competitors is doing some serious black-hat SEO?
One of our competitors just recently increased their total external followed looks pretty drastically. Is it safe to say they are doing some pretty black-hat stuff? What actions exactly could this be attributed to? They've been online and in business for 10+ years and I've seen some pretty nasty drops in traffic on compete.com for them over the years. If this is black-hat work in action, would these two things be most likely related? Wh10b97
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kibin0 -
Hit by Negative SEO
I've seen some discussion here about whether or not negative seo is real. I've just spent 6 months recovering from Penguin, rewriting content, removing hundreds of bad links, and seeing our traffic slowly improve. Yesterday we noticed in Google webmasters tools that we're ranking for the term "Free Sex." Here... http://screencast.com/t/ezoo2sCRXQ Now we have discovered that thousands of "sex" links have been directed at our improving domain. I am convinced I know who the culprit is. What would you advise a client to do in my situation? Forget about removing these damn links. I don't have the time, money or energy to go through that again. I'm sure he can add them much faster than I can ever remove them. Is the disavow tool best answer in this case? Or is there an international court of seo justice that I can appeal to?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DarrenX0 -
Definition of Black Hat SEO
I recently had an old client that called me in a bit of a panic over a significant loss of rankings due to penguin. The internet marketing company she had hired, is actually a very large player in the industry, but because I'm not out to slander anyone, I won't name names. They engaged in some "link building" that resulted in the vast majority of the website's anchor text being keyword-rich, exact match anchor text from such gems as www.link-add.net. They also placed a couple dozen incredibly keyword-rich articles on the site that were clearly not meant for human consumption, and were only accessible through a footer link that's only located on the homepage. The client forwarded me a response from them saying, (quoting verbatim). "We have never engaged in any black hat SEO techniques, nor will we ever engage in any black hat SEO techniques. Just that notion is ridiculous" So clearly, the strategy I outlined above, in the mind of this company, is not black-hat SEO. So getting to my point: **if that's not black hat, then what is? ** I'm posing this question largely because I'm appalled that a large internet marketing company seems to be suggesting that the aforementioned techniques represent good, sound SEO, and I'd like to get an idea as to what people in our industry actually feel are good, acceptable practices. Where is the line? Can we not set higher standards for ourselves?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | stevefidelity0