Advanced Outside Perspective Requested to Combat Negative SEO

[ByteLaunch]

**Situation: **We are a digital marketing agency that has been doing SEO for 6 years. For many years, we maintained exceptional rankings and online visibility.However, I suppose with great rankings comes great vulnerability.

Last year, we became the target of a pretty aggressive and malicious negative SEO campaign from another other SEO(s) in our industry - I'm assuming they're competitors.

Overnight, there were 10,000+ links built on various spam domains using the anchor text:

• negative marketing services
• poor seo
• butt crack
• kickass
• ... and more (see attached image)

The issue we face are:

1. Time Investment - Enormous investment of time and energy to contact each web admin for link removal.
2. Hard to Keep Up - When we think we're getting somewhere, new links come out of the woodwork.
3. Disavow Doesn't Work - Though we've tried to generally avoid the disavow tool, we've had to use it for a few domains. However, it's difficult to say how much effect, if any, it's had on the negative links.

As you can imagine, we've seen an enormous drop in organic traffic since this all started.

It's unfortunate that SEO has come to this point, but I still see a lot of value in what we do and hope that spammers don't completely ruin it for us one day.

Moz Community - I come to you seeking some new insight, advice, similar experiences or anything else that may help!

• Are there any other agencies that have experienced the same issue?
• Any new ways to combat really aggressive negative SEO link building?

Thanks everyone!

UUPPplJ

[ByteLaunch]

Felip3,

Thanks for the response. I agree - it's too easy for spammers to attack and destroy brands. I especially agree, and have always been proponent, of diversifying traffic sources. Of course, when the majority of website traffic is coming from Organic (as it was for us) and then drops off, it can still leave a bruise.

Thanks,

Mike

[ByteLaunch]

Chris,

Thanks for the response. We've heard about Link Detox but have never used it because we've never had these issue for our clients. However, the short-term investment for a single account ($299/mo) is nothing when compared to the number of hours we've already put into trying to (somewhat) manually clean up our link profile. I think we'll give it a try and provide an update in a few months.

Thanks!

Mike

[Felip3]

Unfortunately Google created a easy way for competitors or people with bad intention, destroy other people business. If website "Y" is being outrank by website "Z". Website Y instead of improve their link profile, have the option to buy bad links for the competitor.  Also if you offend someone and this person has nothing to do with your industry  the person can still drop your ranks paying less than $100 dollars.

Matt Cuts said that a simple disavow would work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znOqJu3le2g

But from what you  and many others are saying is not working.

When the  upgrade was released  Google knew those problems would happens yet, they didn't do anything to avoid the issue. In my humble opinion Google just want sale more PPC.

I think the only way to build a solid web business is having your traffic coming from  many sources  or  you create a single point of failure. This is complex task if you think how big is Google Market share, but as web Marketers we have to figure out a way to do so.

[GPainter]

Bit of a short response, but have you considered automating this?

We've used link detox: http://www.linkdetox.com for a few of our clients in the same situation and the results have been good.

You can also specify all of your current disavowed links to avoid duplicating work.

Using that tool you could automate the scan and it would generate you a disavow list each time.