Help Dealing with Sustained Negative SEO Attack
-
Hello,
I am hoping that someone is able to help with a problem that is destroying both my business and my health. We are an ecommerce site who have been trading since 2004 and who have always had strong rankings in Google. Unfortunately, over the past couple of months, these have significantly decreased (I would estimate around 40% drop in organic traffic). We have not had a manual penalty and still have decent rankings for a lot of competitive keywords, so we think it is more likely to be an algorithmic penalty.The most likely culprit is due to a huge scale negative SEO attack that has been going on for around 18 months. Last September, we suffered a major drop in rankings as a result of the 302 hijack scheme, but after submitting a disavow file (of around 500 domains) on 12th November, we recovered on 26th November (although we now don't know whether this was due to disavow file or the Phantom III update on 19th November).After suffering another major drop at the end of June, we submitted a disavow file of 1100 domains (this the scale of the problem!). This tempoarily halted the slide, however it is getting worse again. I have attached a file from Majestic which shows the increase in the backlinks (however we are not building these).We are at a loss and desperately need help. We have contacting all the sites to try and get links removed but they are happening faster than we can contact them. We have also done a full technical audit and added around 50,000 words of unique, handwritten content, as well as continuing to work through all technical fixes and improvements.At the moment, the only thing we can think of doing is submitting a weekly disavow for all the new spammy domains that come up. The questions I have are:
- Is there anything we can do to stop the attack?
- Is this increase in backlinks likely to be the culprit for the drops (both the big drops and the subsequent weekly 10% drop)?
- If so, would weekly disavows solve the problem?
- Is this likely to take months (years?) to recover from or can it be done quicker?
- Can you give me any ray of light to help me sleep at night?
Really appreciate any and all help. I wouldn't wish ths on anyone.Thanks,Simon
-
Thanks for the feedback, we've just been finding them by doing Google searches.
We will start to work through the points you have raised.
-
It's hard to see all the results from outside, but I did notice a few instances.
Where are you discovering these bogus 302 redirects, and what tools are you using to find them? Here are a few steps I would try to help:
- Redirecting non-www pages
- Use absolute internal linking on your site (full links with domain names)
- Have random, updated content on each page
- Use the “base” meta tag
-
Thanks Joshua, have sent you a PM
-
I'd be happy to provide another perspective if you'd like as well. If I can be helpful let me know.
-
Thanks very much David, I've sent you a PM
-
I can take a look. Can you PM me the domain please?
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
-
International SEO Options?
Hi we currently have a site which is a example.com domain in the Australian market (we have geo-targeted to Australia within search console). We are looking to expand to United States. I have added the potential options down below, just wondering which one you guys think would be best from a SEO and practical standpoint? Or if there are other options i should consider? Option 1 The Australian domain is strong so this option takes this into consideration. Keep example.com (Australian) Add on: Sub-Directory for US Which would be: example.com/us/ In Search Console set the sub-folder to target US and also setup hreflang tags. Setup the US site on the sub-directory. Option 2 Add sub-folders for both Aus and US example/au/ (Australian)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jaynamarino
example/us/ (United States) Setup hreflang targeting. Cons
Need to set up redirects for the current site to new location which is .com/au/ might also see drop in performance due to redirects. Cheers.0 -
SEO Strategy help
Hi, I run a B2B 3rd party retail ecommerce site and I am kind of stuck on how to implement my SEO strategy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steve45058
So I learned from AdWords data that the best converting words to my site is the (Brand name, Model Number). Many of my B2B customers already know what they want/are looking for. Now this is all fine and dandy for adwords, but I don't really know how to implement this strategy on the SEO side. I do rank decent for some of these product keywords, but 99% of them I do not (which confuses me because some of the brands I rank high for are the more popular brands eg. more competition.) When I do keyword research on SEMRush or another site, it tells me that the competition for this type of keyword strategy is extremely high. Any Help, Advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!1 -
Technical SEO
Hi Team, What are the points we are missing on our website from technical SEO front? http://www.giftxoxo.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Robots.txt help
Hi Moz Community, Google is indexing some developer pages from a previous website where I currently work: ddcblog.dev.examplewebsite.com/categories/sub-categories Was wondering how I include these in a robots.txt file so they no longer appear on Google. Can I do it under our homepage GWT account or do I have to have a separate account set up for these URL types? As always, your expertise is greatly appreciated, -Reed
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
SEO and former site
Hi, my client had a site built and hosted with Avvo but we now shut it down and are using a new server. My concern is that Avvo's internal link structure is causing SEO issues. For example, his site will list for "San Diego Criminal Defense Attorney", but is then removed for no reason. Far worse, while he had the AVVO site, it would never rank at all on Google. He's got great content, and no spammy links. This is the site: www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com. Any thoughts of what I could do to disavow the AVVO pages that Google still has indexed? Does it matter? Or, is it simply a function of time? Thank you for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Need help creating sitemap
Hello, The details of my question is sitemap related. Below is the background info: we are ecommerce site with around 4000 pages, and 20000 images. we dont have a sitemap implemented on our site yet. i have checked alot of sitemap tools out there, like g-sitecrawler, xml sitemap, a1 sitemap builder etc, and i tried to create sitemaps via them, but all them give different results. the major links are all there, but the results start to vary for level 2, level 3 links and so on. plus no matter how much i read up on sitemaps, the more i am getting confused. i read lots of seomoz articles on sitemaps, and due to my limited seo and technical knowledge, the extra information on these articles gets more confusing. i also just read an article on seomoz that instead of having one sitemap, having multiple smaller sitemaps is very good idea, specially if we are adding lots of new products (which we are). Now my question: My question is having understood the immense value of sitemap (and by having it very poorly implemented before), how can i make sure that i get a very good sitemap (both xml and html sitemap). i do not want to do something again and just repeat old mistakes by having a poorly implemented sitemap for our site. I am hoping that one of the professionals out there, can help me also make and implement the sitemap. If you can please point me to the right direction.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kannu10 -
How do you Hire someone for SEO?
What questions do you ask when hiring an SEO person? What is the most important thing in selecting a company for SEO? Should they be able to make recommendations on changes in your website for seo?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Realtor1010 -
Indirect SEO boost from links
I have 2 ecommerce sites, each with a blog. I am increasing my linkbuilding efforts, but I don't want to build too many links directly to my 2 sites over a short period of time. I have decided that I will add a certain number of links to sites/pages that are already linking to my main sites (for example, a blog post on my blog, guest post on another blog, article submission, etc.). How much of a benefit can I expect in terms of rankings? Has anyone tested this out or experimented with something like this? What are the pros and cons? I appreciate thoughtful comments.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0