Negative SEO campaign just started against my site. What do I do?
-
As the question says, I have just got alerts of new links, being clearly a negative seo campaign against my site.
We are talking, lots of spammy, rude anchor text type keywords being used. Whilst I only have alerts of a small number (around 30), it has just happened and I know from the type of spammy links they are that more will be coming.
So, question is, should I disavow? Do I keep submitting new disavows every few days as more are discovered?
Any advice will be greatly be appreciated.
-
Andy - I am actually using cognitiveseo which incorporates all the links from places like moz, majestic and ahrefs. You can also import your webmaster tool links as well with a few clicks.
It then has a link browser, highlights unnatural links (which you can modify), and will create a disavow file for you. After the initial panic, when I wrote my first post here, I know feel quite comfortable with how I am dealing with it.
I think the stats update every couple of days, so its not instant like going to places like ahrefs and majestic direct, but as it collates all the data from all sites I can deal with that limitation.
-
this is the one thing I dread happening.
Apart from what you are doing there isn't a lot until it stops - I wish there was a button in web-master tools to tell Google that a competitor (and it usually is) is doing bad SEO to your site.
If you do try anything other, then please share. I am currently putting together an contingency plan in case it ever happens to the site I manage.
I can see this becoming more prevalent in future and a lot more companies using these tactics to get an SEO advance. I could even see some dodgy SEO agency's setting up to offer this type of service.
-
I have no idea who may have done it. I have just submitted my disavow file, with 130 domains. More than I thought.
So at least I can sleep easy now, and will just keep an eye on it over the next few weeks.
Thanks for the responses,... pretty much confirmed what I thought.
-
Jonathan - I would suggest doing the same thing that Lesley mentioned in order to make sure that you are only disavowing the spam links. You might also want to try dealing with the spammer directly, if possible.
If the links are coming primarily from the same source, you might be able to resolve the issue directly with the spammer. That might be far fetched, but we had a recent issue with spam links on a small scale, from a disgruntled customer of one of our clients. Unfortunately the customer never expressed any frustration to the client, and instead started posting negative reviews, links with negative anchor text, etc. We were actually able to contact the spammer directly, resolve their frustration with the client's product and the spammer actually started doing the complete opposite - changed negative reviews to positive, and it ended better than we could have anticipated.
This might not work for your particular situation, but just thought I would share.
-
Hi thanks.
Yeh, just signed up with cognitive seo which amalgamates from ahrefs and others. I have hundreds of spammy links.
Looks like I have my work cut out here. Will go through webmaster tools next.
Thanks
Jonathan
-
If it were me, this is what I would do. I would export all of your back links from google webmaster tools. You can do this by going to webmaster tools -> links to your site -> all domains and click to export table.
From there I would if possible go through the list and make a master list of "good" links. Take that list of good links and copy that column into a text file as and save it as a reference point of good quality links. Then every day I would go and download the latest links from webmaster tools, copy and put them in a text file as well. Then I would use beyond compare to see the new links to the site by comparing the "master good link file" to the daily generated files. If you have time, go through the different links and see if any of them are legitimate good quality links. If it is too many, I would just start disavowing them all until the attack is over.
I would also think about signing up to other services as well, like ahrefs and the others that have crawlers, because one crawler will not find all of the links more than likely and from experience GWT will not show you every link either.
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
-
Change domains and start over?
We have a fairly new client who has taken part in many questionable SEO technique over the past few years (mainly buying links and directory web pages). In an effort to fix this they hired three separate SEO’s – we are the fourth. Over the past 3 months we have spent lots of time following best practice techniques to clean up and improve their rankings (including link removal requests but not yet disavow), and after some initially positive results, things are looking down again. Given Google’s apparent rolling algorithm updates and the mess we have found, we are wondering if the best option is to change domains and start over (downside is that they are in a highly competitive industry)? My other question pertains to a domain change and if we were to change from a plural to a singular, would that be enough for Google? (e.g from www.domains.com to www.domain.com). The idea is that we start the link building process again – but keep their brand intact. Really appreciate any feedback.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | E2E0 -
What is left ethical? What is working for offpage SEO? Very long write up in here and my take on things.
Hello,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarketingOfAmerica
Please ignore misspells and grammar, this was typed quickly as I am spending my time researching not writing a perfect book on it. My goal is to find ethical very hard to get links unlike guest posts which are now dead according to Matt Cutt's blog here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/. My journey started with a quick message to Rand Fishkin, he responded the following "Hi Matthew - thankfully, there's literally hundreds of link building methodologies that are still completely legit. Check out http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building and you'll find tons and tons of them. The key is that none are easy, none are particularly scalable, and all of them require doing work that will add value for searchers, for your brand, and for your overall marketing - which is exactly what Google wants to count. Wish you all the best," Thanks Rand Fishkin! So I started my search looking for links that are hard to get other than those that are directories, forum links that are dead and spammy, blog comments which are overused, guest posts, or any type of black hat link. I figured I would start to check what other popular SEO companies were doing and that have been at the top through many of the updates. After running an analysis on the term SEO services I found the following Test 1. I analyzed Main Street Host to start with. If you type in SEO services in Google you can see they are rank 1 for it. After a quick analysis it's easy to see that they have 100's of footer links on clients that they have, some with exact match anchors and some without. My question is, is why is this a viable tactic? Lets take for example the following. If you pull up their http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ stats and look at the inbound links you will come to an exact match anchor right away that says SEO Marketing Company. I went to the weebly link that they have and found that they have put their name at the bottom of this page. Issue 1 - Why is it ok for this type of link, but it's not ok for a template link? Aren't these links suppose to be penalized? Issue 2 - Nothing on the page is even relevant to their link at all. As we have read before, you need to have links surrounding relevant text. Take a look at their backlinks you and you will find almost all of their high quality links are exact match anchors coming from their clients surrounded by irrelevant text. Why is this working? How is this different than a network? What stops someone from just starting a network and dedicating 1 footer link to a full site and putting up dummy info... Anyone can go to Godaddy and purchase a DA 40+ site or so and throw up $20 of content and a footer link. As I dove deeper into finding what is ethical and working I discovered many of the top SEO companies use this. Not just one, but over 20 of them use this same method. Lets use another example. So I started to look at what they did for their clients. How did I know who they worked for? Simple I assume that since they have their link at the bottom of the page and claim that they do SEO for them, they are indeed working for them. So I analyzed the site we talked about a while ago on the Weebly that they had their link on. It's the Valley Art Weebly link if your checking yourself. I quickly found that they are using a network to rank up some of their clients as well. For example http://firesidebookshop.com/index.html Take a look at the link on this page leading to the art place. At first glance the site doesn't look spammy, but try to buy a book, or even order one. Who has an online book store, but doesn't sell books lol? Who also puts interesting links on their home page? This screams network to me. I am willing to bet the following will happen - Matt Cutts and his spam team will ad something like the following to the algorithm or whatever you would like to call it "ignore link if total outbound dofollow links on full site = x amount or higher" = internal Google disavow tool = bye to guest blogging. So what is everyone going to do? Okay it's time to figure out what that number is right? Lets do some tests and lets say that magic number is 5 to 10 links on a whole site. What does this do? This drives the price of quick SEO up again evening the playing field for others using ethical SEO like myself. How do I figure this? Lets face it black hat SEO will never end as long as someone is able to do it. Now since guest posts are gone, the quick link on quality sites surrounded by enough text to count is gone. This means that it will cost extra money, because everyone will be forced to put a max of x amount of links to be safe and for the links to get noticed on a website. So now they have to purchase an established domain that is high enough quality to pass the correct link juice through to a clients site that they want to rank up. Lets figure a few dollars for a unique IP, another few for the hosting, $40 to $100 for the domain if your lucky on Godaddy auctions, and then $40 for the content to make it look realistic if your getting it for $0.01 a word. Plus the time it takes to setup your site. This price of that $30 Odesk guest post backlink just went up to a min of $100 or so. Diving deeper into what's working and moving past the networks, because I feel this will only work temporarily as well if you are brave enough to use this and I know I am not. It doesn't seem to ethical to me at the end of the day even though some may argue, you are just creating more relevant websites which can maximize your traffic streams. The problem is I have stopped here and am stuck. Sure I have looked at http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building and read the most recent post where it talks about 31 types of links. Most of those links don't apply or are outdated and you shouldn't use them. Some of them talk about forum links,directories, bookmarks.. Those have been tactics for years and sure you may find 1 out of 1000 that are good, but the rest are just spam. I have been over to search engine land, and a handful of other sites. I have talked to many other SEO's as well. They are emailing me asking what they should do after guest posts, because they are unsure. The question is, what is ethical? Let say you have a plumber, or a roofer, .gov links are nearly impossible for them and quite frankly that seems spammy to me to even post them on one. I know what many are going to say, build links as if your not worried about Google and you will grow.. Where are you going to build the links to if everything is unethical? As we know clients will walk if they don't see improvements quickly. What's quickly? I would say around the 3 to 6 month period using ethical SEO. Sure there is onpage, a great blog, etc., but what is there left truly ethical for offpage SEO besides some good press releases, some social profile links like a pinterst, and the normal? I must be missing something! I am not looking for the easy way, I am not afraid to get my hands dirty and work hard. If anyone can show me a quick example of a truly ethical link I would be grateful to see this. I can't seem to wrap my head around something that I can do that will last at this point. If you don't want to share it to the world, please PM me. [edited for formatting by Keri Morgret]0 -
My Website Just Got Penalized
I had a website that recently got penalized. The pagerank dropped to zero on the homepage and moved to page 200 on google. I checked manual actions on my site in web mastertools and it says that no webspam is found. I am curious to find out why my website would drop. I had a a network of 5 blogs that I was linking to the site that also lost page rank but theres is N/A now. I am thinking thats where the trouble started because i did not use no follow. Question 1 My question is if I remove all the links to the other site or make them no follow will the penalty lift. I am thinking that the penalty is an automated on and not a manual one. Does any one have experience with automated penalties? Did they lift after you fixed the issues. Did you regain most of your original rankings? Question 2 What happens to all my blogs. I spent all lot of money on have posts written for it. Can any of the content be salvaged. I have over 1000 pages written on 5 different blogs. I can send you a list of the urls so you can see what I am talking about.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WindshieldGuy-2762210 -
Failed microsites that negatively affect main site: should I just redirect them all?
While they are great domain names, I suspect my 7 microsites are considered spammy and resulted in a filter on my main e-commerce site for the important keywords we now have a filter blocking from showing up in search. Should I consider it a sunk cost and redirect them all to my main e-commerce site, or is there any reason why that would make things worse? I've fixed just about everything I can thinking of in response to Panda and Penguin, before which we were on the first page for everything. That includes adding hundreds of pages of unique and relevant content, in the form of buyers guides and on e-commerce category pages -- resolving issues of thin content. Then I hid URL parameters in Ajax, sped up the site significantly, started generating new links... nothing... I have tons of new keywords for other categories, but I still clearly have that filter on those few important head keywords. The anchor text on the microsites leading to the main site are typically not exact match, so I don't think that's the issue. It has to be that the sites themselves are considered spammy. My bosses are not going to like the idea because they paid for those awesome domains, but would the best idea be to redirect them to the e-commerce site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ElBo9130 -
Site review
Can any one give me a quick site review, recently started work for the company on the seo, just want to asking if I am missing anything that may hinder SEO and SERPs etc www.teamac.co.uk
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TeamacPaints0 -
Is my SEO consultant doing blackhat tactic?
Hi, Can someone tell me what my SEO consultant is doing? I have engaged a SEO company in Singapore for my site: Http://www.rollerblinds.com.sg The thing is for the 1st 2 months, it is ranking well but for the next 4 months it is out of google. I noticed my links are on some strange article site. Is he doing blackhat tactic, I have been paying monthly for many months now with no result. Shall I continue to pay and how can I recover?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | chanel270 -
Why is our site being penalized?
The rankings for our transcription site (gmr transcription) fell around Jul 19. Its been an uphill task to get the rankings back particularly for the keyword 'transcription services'. As per our opinion except for one competitor the rankings of the other top 4 makes no sense to us. We have tested our site and there seems to be no reason for it to be penalized. After a month of trial I am reaching out to the community for advise.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Sangeeta0
