Could this be negative SEO?
-
Hi,
I've attached a copy of our Google ranking for one of our keywords for our site and a competitor. Also shown is the number of external links over time for the same 2 sites.
There seems to be a striking resemblance between the 2 sites so could this be the result of negative SEO?
What's the best way to determine whether you've been targeted for negative SEO?
Thanks,
-
It could definitely be a response from Panda/Penguin, as Irving pointed out the best thing for you to do is use a backlinks tool such as Open Site Explorer and take a look at who is linking to your website.
Are these websites spammy or could they be blacklisted by Google? -
use back link tools to see who is linking to you and from where. it's super fast to determine if someone is spamming links to your website.
-
Was this not around the time of pengiun and panda updates?
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
-
How to make second site in same niche and do white hat SEO
Hello, As much as we would like, there's a possibility that our site will never recover from it's Google penalties. Our team has decided to launch a new site in the same niche. What do we need to do so that Google will not mind us having 2 sites in the same niche? (Menu differences, coding differences, content differences, etc.) We won't have duplicate content, but it's hard to make the sites not similar. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Wanna see Negative SEO?
One of my clients got hit with negative SEO in the past few days. Check it out in ahrefs. The site is www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com. Any advice on what, if anything, I should do? Google disavow? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mrodriguez14401 -
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 -
Question about local SEO when you serve many more cities than you have brick and mortar locations
My URL is: http://www.mollysmusic.org for the record.I run a music school that serves in-home lessons to a whole slew of cities. Since I only have 3 brick-and-mortar locations, I can't make google local profiles for all the cities served, but I want to get seen by those people searching in their own cities. Right now, our biggest competitor, takelessons.com, is top ranked for every single city you can think of, because they have individual web pages for every city served. Their content is repetitive and scrapey, and to me, that says "doorway page" which supposedly can get you de-indexed. I'm reluctant to do that because I'm afraid I'll get banned, but I have to compete. I also want a strategy that can scale when we move into new areas. Is there something that makes TakeLessons's content NOT a doorway page? What's the best practice for getting ranked in multiple individual cities if you run a service? Thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mollysmusic0 -
Press Releases and SEO in 2013
Mozers, A few questions for the community: Distributing a press release through a service like 24-7pressrelease.com - is it a serious duplicate content issue when an identical press release is distributed to multiple sites with no canonical markup (as far as I can tell)? All of the backlinks in the press release are either nofollow or redirects. If there IS a duplicate content issue, will the website be affected negatively given the numerous Panda and Penguin refreshes? Why SHOULDN'T a company issue a press release to multiple sites if it actually has something legitimate to announce and the readership of a given site is the target demographic? For example, why shouldn't a company that manufactures nutritional health supplements issue the same press release to Healthy Living, Lifestyle, Health News, etc _with a link to the site?_I understand it's a method that can be exploited for SEO purposes, but can't all SEO methods be taken to an extreme? Seems to me that if this press release scenario triggers the duplicate content and/or link spam penalty(ies), I'd consider it a slight deficiency of Google's search algorithm. Any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | b40040400 -
Definition of Black Hat SEO
I recently had an old client that called me in a bit of a panic over a significant loss of rankings due to penguin. The internet marketing company she had hired, is actually a very large player in the industry, but because I'm not out to slander anyone, I won't name names. They engaged in some "link building" that resulted in the vast majority of the website's anchor text being keyword-rich, exact match anchor text from such gems as www.link-add.net. They also placed a couple dozen incredibly keyword-rich articles on the site that were clearly not meant for human consumption, and were only accessible through a footer link that's only located on the homepage. The client forwarded me a response from them saying, (quoting verbatim). "We have never engaged in any black hat SEO techniques, nor will we ever engage in any black hat SEO techniques. Just that notion is ridiculous" So clearly, the strategy I outlined above, in the mind of this company, is not black-hat SEO. So getting to my point: **if that's not black hat, then what is? ** I'm posing this question largely because I'm appalled that a large internet marketing company seems to be suggesting that the aforementioned techniques represent good, sound SEO, and I'd like to get an idea as to what people in our industry actually feel are good, acceptable practices. Where is the line? Can we not set higher standards for ourselves?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | stevefidelity0 -
Any e-commerce users recommend an SEO company for link building?
I manage an e-commerce site. I wanted to know if anyone has worked with an SEO company for link-building that they would recommend. I DO NOT want articled directories, bookmarks, etc.. I want real link-building from credible/related sites. If you would give me an idea of the results or the general process they use I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
White Papers! Is this still good for SEO
Does publishing a white paper good for SEO? We are trying to decide to publish one or not for the purpose of SEO. If it will not help, we will spend money for other things.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AppleCapitalGroup0