Advanced Outside Perspective Requested to Combat Negative SEO
-
**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:
- Time Investment - Enormous investment of time and energy to contact each web admin for link removal.
- Hard to Keep Up - When we think we're getting somewhere, new links come out of the woodwork.
- 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!
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
SEO Links in Footer?
Hi, One of my clients uses a pretty powerful SEO tool, won't mention the name. They now have a "link equity" tool, which they are using on a lot of their client's sites, which include tons of fortune 500 companies. It involves add footer links to your site that change based on the content of the page they are on. The machine learning tries to figure out the most related pages and links to them with the heading tag of that page as the anchor text. Initially this sounds very spammy to me. But then, it seems a lot like "related products" tools that many companies use. The goal for this tool is to build up internal linking, especially for deeper pages on their site. They have over 10,000 currently. What are everyone's thoughts on this strategy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vetofunk2 -
Disavow or not? Negative SEO
Since last November we have been receiving a lot of low quality backlinks from over 700 websites. It looks like one of our pages from our website has been copied with the links being kept as they are. I have left a link to an example of this here: https://goo.gl/eWQODJ Please note, all examples seem to be copied in the same way. We have also started seeing a decrease in the amount of organic traffic (Analytics Picture), As you can see the decrease is not yet so drastically high, but it is still a decrease and this is the third consecutive month we have seen this decrease. Do you think it is worth it to use Disavow tool for all of these bad link or not? uuuLt
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm1 -
Best Link Building Strategies in Modern SEO
Hello, In light of all the updates and also in guest blogging being only for nofollow links now, what's some of the best strategies for link building for ecommerce sites? We're in an industry where the content doesn't get linked to very much. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
What is the difference between Positive Impact, No Impact, Negative Impact and Extremely Negative Impact in term of Google Update like panda or penguin etc.
What is the difference between Positive Impact, No Impact, Negative Impact and Extremely Negative Impact in term of Google Update like panda or penguin etc.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dotlineseo0 -
Many Regional Pages: Bad for SEO?
Hello Moz-folks We are relatively well listed for "Edmonton web design." - the city we work out of. As an effort to reach out new clients, we created about 15 new pages targeting other cites in Alberta, BC and Saskatchewan. Although we began to show up quite well in some of these regions, we have recently seen our rankings in Edmonton drop by a few spots. I'm wondering if setting up regional pages that have lots of keywords for that region can be detrimental to our overall rankings.Here is one example of a regional page: http://www.web3.ca/red-deer-web-design Thanks, Anton TWeb3 Marketing Inc.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Web3Marketing870 -
Redirecting old domains for SEO ranking?
It's been a while since I read anything seriously out of the box on SEO but I thought I would see what others thought of the bold assertions made in this article. Most of it revolves around buying expired domains and using a 301 to point them, and their juice, to new sites. This guy makes a living doing this so he has to know a bit more than the average Joe but I'm wondering where the other shoe is and when it drops.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Highland0 -
Negative SEO - Case Studies Prove Results. De-rank your competitors
Reading these two articles made me feel sick. People are actually offering a service to de-rank a website. I could have swore I heard Matt Cutts say this was not possible, well the results are in. This really opens up a whole new can of worms for google. http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2369-case-study-negative-seo-results/ http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-case-study/ This is only going to get worse as news like this will spread like wildfire. In one sense, its good these people have done this to prove it to google its just a pity they did it on real business's that rely on traffic.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dean19860