How do I deal with Negative SEO (Spammy Links)?

[Changsst]

For the past 12 months, our website has been hit by spammy links with annoying anchor text.

We suspected one of our competitor are deploying negative SEO on us.

The image is an example of the sites and anchor text we have been spammed with.

The frequency is about 1 - 2 spammy links a day.

I have a few questions from here onwards:

1. Does those links affect our SEO? (Most are mainly nofollow)

2. Other than disavow, what other stuff can I do?

3. How will google and other search engines see this incident?

TcmFsti

[MarieHaynes]

Hi,

When I see links like this, the first thing I worry about is whether your site has been hacked. But yes, attempts at negative SEO are possible as well.

Whenever, Google is asked about negative SEO like this they say that they are generally really good at determining that these are not links that you made yourself and that you are safe to ignore them. But, they do always recommend disavowing just to be sure.

Here are my thoughts on your questions:

1. Do these links hurt your SEO, even if nofollowed? If nofollowed they are no harm to you. However, in some hackings what the hackers will do is point thousands of nofollowed links from domains they control and then, somewhere down the road they can change them to followed. As such, in this case I'd still disavow the nofollowed links.

2. What else can you do other than disavow? Not much unfortunately. If you find that a lot of these links point to a particular page you can 404 or 410 that page and that will get rid of the links. But otherwise, sadly, there's not much else you can do.

3. Most likely Google will ignore these links but no one can say for sure.

[JordanLowry]

Moz has a good blog addressing negative seo and the potential effects it may have. Matt Cutts has stated that it isnt impossible for a competitor to harm your site through negative seo but it is very rare. So unless you have thousands of links pointing at your site I would not worry too much. Just make use of the disavow tool and you should be fine.