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Keri,

Happy belated Thanksgiving!

It's been about 3.5 months, so just wanted to give a quick update on this in case anyone else is still having this issue.

Unfortunately, we haven't really seen a solution to this but have improved our situation.

During the period of September 10-17, we contacted Perfect Audience to see if they were experiencing the same security issues as AdRoll. They confirmed that they too had seen some customers affected by this invalid traffic and so their engineers worked on modifying their tag to "no longer track IE7 traffic" and "blacklist all domains" that the traffic was coming from."

Unfortunately, this had no positive effect on our client's traffic issues.

Half-way through October, we saw invalid traffic spike once again into the thousands and stay there until around mid-November.

Half-way through November, the client migrated to a secure site (HTTPs), which actually made a notable difference in the invalid traffic, causing it to reduce down to, what we might consider, normalized numbers.

Although this seemed to help, unfortunately it still didn't completely address the problem. Today, we're still seeing IE7 as the top browser with 95% bounce rate.

At this point, we're just left to run filters to exclude the IE7 traffic until this essentially resolves itself (crossing fingers).

Keri,

Thank you for the response and pointing me in the right direction. It seems the fingers are being pointed at AdRoll as it was having websites in its ad exchange network drive invalid traffic to its advertisers' websites.

The thing is ... the client is not even an AdRoll advertiser nor do they have AdRoll's script implemented in the code. However, they did use Perfect Audience in the past and still have that script on the site.

I'll test removing the script and see what that does. In the meantime, I'll reach out to Perfect Audience to see if this is something they're also dealing with.

Thanks again Keri!

Hi Mozzers, we're hoping to get some insight from some of the technical folks out there on what seems to be malicious targeting of a client's website.

We recently discovered enormous spikes in direct traffic to the website with 90% originating from the USA and the rest coming from dozens of other countries. Nearly 100% of visits are new sessions and each only lasts a few seconds - thereby driving the bounce rate over 95%!

There are other possible identifiers worth noting, including:

• Browser - 99% use Internet Explorer
• Browser Version - 89% use IE 7.0
• Flash Version - 80% use 14.0 r0
• Operating System - 99% use Windows

See the attached "Screenshot - Traffic Spikes & Inflated Bounce Rate".

Whether this is a negative SEO attack or something else, we're really hoping to get the community's input and (hopefully) possible solutions.

Thanks!

oYKrMu6

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

**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

By different domains I'm assuming you're referring to the top level domains (ex: .ca, .co.uk., .gr, etc.) If this is the case, we are NOT doing SEO on multiple domains. The entire global strategy will be on the same ".COM" domain.

In other words, each country will have its own sub folder.

For example:

• Canada = http://www.client.com/ca/
• United Kingdom = http://www.client.com/ca/
• etc.

They want to do SEO for 36 countries in one year, but since each country has at least 2 different languages, we're essentially doubling that number to 72 campaigns. Is this safe or are we going to get busted for looking spammy at this level of growth?

SITUATION: Our client is a global company lacking the global presence, so naturally the idea is performing international/global SEO in each country.

For benchmarking purposes, our plan is to focus on a select number of keywords (ie 8-15) for each country and begin link building within each respective country. All SEO effort (ie. link building) will be for sub-folders (ie. www.client.com/subfolder/) on the same top level domain.

Note, each country may have multiple languages, so each language will be broken out as it's own unique SEO campaign with it's very own strategy and link building efforts.

For example: Mexico has 2 languages (English & Spanish) and will be considered 2 separate campaigns.

PROBLEM: The client wants to be extremely aggressive and perform SEO on 3 new countries every month. This amounts to 36 new countries/SEO campaigns per year. Assuming each country has 2 languages each, we are looking at 6 SEO campaigns per month, or 72 per year.

Our concern is that since all SEO effort will be performed on the same top level domain, we may be growing too fast and the search engines may consider the addition of these new pages and links to be too 'spammy'.

We'd love to hear some feedback or personal experience on what might be considered a "safe" or "healthy" expansion into different countries.

Thanks!

Curious what's going on here. This is the first time I've seen this before. What's happening is this ...

1. In Google, I search for "mobile apps orange county" and get a standard list of 10 results.
2. I go to Google's search settings in the top right corner of the page (button is grey with a gear) to change the number of results per page from 10 to 50 (also did 100).
3. When I go back to Google and search again for "mobile apps orange county" I get a much larger list but with completely different results. This time around the top 10-12 are dominated by the same website (ocregister.com)

What's going on here that Google would now show different results? Why is this one website all of a sudden dominating the first 12 results?

Thanks everyone!

ByteLaunch