Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

**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! UUPPplJ

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 ... In Google, I search for "mobile apps orange county" and get a standard list of 10 results. 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). 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