Negative SEO + Disavow
-
My site is very new (~1 years old), but due to good PR we have gotten some decent links and are already ranking for a key term.
This may be why someone decided to start a negative SEO attack on us.
We've had less than 200 linking domains up until 2 weeks ago, but since then we have been getting 100+ new domains /day with anchor texts that are either targeted to that key term or are from porn websites.
I've gone through the links to get ready and submit a disavow... but should I do it?
My rankings/site traffic has not been affected yet.
Reasons for my hesitations:
1. Google always warns against using the disavow, and says "you shouldn't have to use it if you are a normal website." (sensing 'guilty-until-proven')
2. Some say Google is only trying to get the data to see if there are any patterns within the linking sites. I don't want the site owners to get hurt, since the villain is someone else using xrumer to put spammy comments on their site.
What would you do?
-
Thanks everyone!
-
This is also worth a read and watch the short video where you will get your answer from the 'horses mouth' (English term!)
http://searchengineland.com/googles-cutts-got-bad-links-to-your-site-dont-fret-it-disavow-it-169131
-
+1 to everything that Robert said. I wanted to add this info from John Muller at a Webmaster Central Hangout. You can see the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEAQyHtRQxg and start watching at 23:30.
Someone asks John about a situation where a competitor is pointing thousands of spammy links at them a day. John says that the algorithm is pretty good at ignoring those links but says that it may be a good idea to disavow them just in case.
One thing that I have found though is that a lot of people who think that they are under a negative SEO attack really just have a normal backlink profile. Prior to Penguin, the average webmaster would not go through their links with the scrutiny that they utilize today. You would be surprised of the kind of junk that is in the backlink profile of most sites, even if they have not done any link building!
-
Alice,
Without more data and something visual it is hard to say what I would do. Are you sure the links are from 100 different domains a day? Versus 100 links from a domain or two? I am only asking for clarity sake.
If there is a way to give us a screenshot it would help. Short of that, I would say if you are not being affected yet, look in GWMT and see if the bad links are showing there yet. If they are not, that may be the reason. (With ahrefs for example, you will pick up the links long before Google does.) If it begins to affect performance, I would use the disavow tool to block them. I realize it is a lot of work, but I have seen a major client get hit by bad links and have helped them using the disavow tool.
What you are stating re the tool and Google's warning needs some balance - Google states that it can harm your site's performance. An example would be someone being over worried and they disavow 75% of their links, they are likely to fall in ranking.
As to: "you shouldn't have to use it if you are a normal website" is not a guilty until proven statement IMO. It is actually Google stating you should not just have use it willy nilly. This is from Google:
The disavow backlinks tool should be used with caution since it can potentially harm your site's performance. However, if you see a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links point to your site, and you're confident that the links are causing issues for your site, you can use the disavow tool to disavow those links. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool.
So, watch your WMT and the sites ranking and other performance measures. If you see an effect, do not be afraid to take action.
Hope this helps a bit.
Robert
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
-
Menus, Ecommerce & SEO
Hi Our Dev team have updated our website with a new menu structure, they have given us 2 options to choose from. 1st option I think is better for SEO - this will be showing top 8 categories and then subcategories once you hover over category 1. Not much change from our current structure, just a slightly different layout. (I have added an image example of what option1 will look like) 2nd option - is preferred by management - shows all 24 categories & no subcategories. My question is, will removing the current subcategories from the main menu make them lose rankings & make them harder to rank in future? I'm guessing everything will move down a level in the structure and lost page authority... Does anyone have any articles/case studies to prove this point? Any help is much appreciated 🙂 Becky DKzgD
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Seo for international sites
Hello, I have a question for the group, our main US site- http://www.datacard.com is utilized to move content to other regional sites like http://www.datacard.co.uk/ and http://www.datacard.fr/ and http://www.datacard.com.br/. Anyhow, we essentially have some regional content on those sites, but for ease of maintaining and updating the content we have a company translate this for us and then undergo an in country review for local people in our company to review the content. That being said the meta descriptions, titles, code, everything gets translated to that language. I know there are issue for SEO for these purposes as we get much better rankings with http://www.datacard.com. The regional sites are newer so this could be part of it. We don't have an agency helping us with SEo and i get a lot of questions on what can be done internally for this for regional sites with our current structure. Any tips you have? It would be greatly appreciated! Laura
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
Advanced SEO - What would you do after you run out of keywords?
Hello! Our company has been growing in terms of traffic and ranking well for a couple of years but we are now kind of stagnating because we just don't know what to do next. We have a good blog - and with our blogs, we have been targeting all major keywords with their related keywords as a bucket. - "keyword theme / page" for a long time. But it seems we now don't have any major keyword theme to write about. What is worse is that we don't see any traffic growth since 2014 September. (although we added many good blogs) So what would do you when you run out of keywords? or keyword themes? Would you just keep pumping in more blogs and hope that you get more clicks? or at some point, you just don't care about keywords and write whatever relevant to your site? Wouldn't it hurt our site if we create similar keyword themed pages? (like regurgitating our keywords?) or even same keyword targeting pages? You must have similar experience if you are an owner of a niche site. Can you please share your experience with this kind of headaches? Thank you and look forward to your comments.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joony3 -
Does having a ? on the end of your URL affect your SEO?
I have some redirects that were done with at "?" at the end of the URL to include google coding (i.e. you click on an adwords link and the google coding follows the redirected link). When there is not coding to follow the link just appears as "filename.html?". Will that affect us negatively SEO-wise? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock1 -
Local SEO Best Practices
Hello Everyone, I'm new to SEOmoz, I'm looking to use this as a tool to really help me, and evenually I can help others. I am an Web Developer with some online marketing experience. I did Local SEO a Few Years ago, and things have really changed since then. I know this Panda and Penguin update really is putting a hurting on the directory submission. Google no longer has 'Citations" on their places page, and many other changes. With that being said, what are some best practices for Local SEO? I am a propeller head by nature, but am also very creative when I need to be. I have potental sites to market, anywhere from Holistic Medical Doctors, Plastic Surgeons Community Blogs, and Auto Repair Shops, Law firms (to give you some perspectic) I also read Danny Dover's Book, to learn some more about SEO, the one thing that is unclear is how to acquire quality links I would really appreciate any perspective on this, every little thing helps Zach Russell
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZacharyRussell0 -
Iframe redirect bad for SEO?
Hi, I have a website (http://www.blowingminds.de) wich I put a spreadshirt shop into via iframe. The thing is I am not sure on how the iframe effects my SEO? Can I just optimise the main domain for search? Well I want the spreadshirt shop to be found under the domain name (www.blowingminds.de) but the only real way to do it is by implementing an iframe because each spreadshirt shop has its own subdomain eg.: blowingminds.spreadshirt.de but the only real way to do it is via iframe, as they do not offer a complete domain redirect. (Or have I overseen some other way?) I hope you guys can help me on this one 🙂 Thanks in advance. Malte
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wellbo1 -
Expiring URL seo
a buddy of mine is running a niche job board and is having issues with expiring URLs. we ruled it out cuz a 301 is meant to be used when the content has moved to another page, or the page was replaced. We were thinking that we'd be just stacking duplicate content on old urls that would never be 'replaced'. Rather they have been removed and will never come back. So 410 is appropriate but maybe we overlooked something. any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | malachiii0