Negative SEO campaign just started against my site. What do I do?
-
As the question says, I have just got alerts of new links, being clearly a negative seo campaign against my site.
We are talking, lots of spammy, rude anchor text type keywords being used. Whilst I only have alerts of a small number (around 30), it has just happened and I know from the type of spammy links they are that more will be coming.
So, question is, should I disavow? Do I keep submitting new disavows every few days as more are discovered?
Any advice will be greatly be appreciated.
-
Andy - I am actually using cognitiveseo which incorporates all the links from places like moz, majestic and ahrefs. You can also import your webmaster tool links as well with a few clicks.
It then has a link browser, highlights unnatural links (which you can modify), and will create a disavow file for you. After the initial panic, when I wrote my first post here, I know feel quite comfortable with how I am dealing with it.
I think the stats update every couple of days, so its not instant like going to places like ahrefs and majestic direct, but as it collates all the data from all sites I can deal with that limitation.
-
this is the one thing I dread happening.
Apart from what you are doing there isn't a lot until it stops - I wish there was a button in web-master tools to tell Google that a competitor (and it usually is) is doing bad SEO to your site.
If you do try anything other, then please share. I am currently putting together an contingency plan in case it ever happens to the site I manage.
I can see this becoming more prevalent in future and a lot more companies using these tactics to get an SEO advance. I could even see some dodgy SEO agency's setting up to offer this type of service.
-
I have no idea who may have done it. I have just submitted my disavow file, with 130 domains. More than I thought.
So at least I can sleep easy now, and will just keep an eye on it over the next few weeks.
Thanks for the responses,... pretty much confirmed what I thought.
-
Jonathan - I would suggest doing the same thing that Lesley mentioned in order to make sure that you are only disavowing the spam links. You might also want to try dealing with the spammer directly, if possible.
If the links are coming primarily from the same source, you might be able to resolve the issue directly with the spammer. That might be far fetched, but we had a recent issue with spam links on a small scale, from a disgruntled customer of one of our clients. Unfortunately the customer never expressed any frustration to the client, and instead started posting negative reviews, links with negative anchor text, etc. We were actually able to contact the spammer directly, resolve their frustration with the client's product and the spammer actually started doing the complete opposite - changed negative reviews to positive, and it ended better than we could have anticipated.
This might not work for your particular situation, but just thought I would share.
-
Hi thanks.
Yeh, just signed up with cognitive seo which amalgamates from ahrefs and others. I have hundreds of spammy links.
Looks like I have my work cut out here. Will go through webmaster tools next.
Thanks
Jonathan
-
If it were me, this is what I would do. I would export all of your back links from google webmaster tools. You can do this by going to webmaster tools -> links to your site -> all domains and click to export table.
From there I would if possible go through the list and make a master list of "good" links. Take that list of good links and copy that column into a text file as and save it as a reference point of good quality links. Then every day I would go and download the latest links from webmaster tools, copy and put them in a text file as well. Then I would use beyond compare to see the new links to the site by comparing the "master good link file" to the daily generated files. If you have time, go through the different links and see if any of them are legitimate good quality links. If it is too many, I would just start disavowing them all until the attack is over.
I would also think about signing up to other services as well, like ahrefs and the others that have crawlers, because one crawler will not find all of the links more than likely and from experience GWT will not show you every link either.
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
-
We have a site with a lot of international traffic, can we split the site some way?
Hello, We have a series of sites and one, in particular, has around 75,000 (20%) monthly users from the USA, but we don't currently offer them anything as our site is aimed at the UK market. The site is a .com and though we own the .co.uk the .com is the primary domain. We have had a lot of success moving other sites to have the .co.uk as the primary domain for UK traffic. However, in this case, we want to keep both the UK traffic and the US traffic and if we split it into two sites, only one can win right? What could do? It would be cool to have a US version of our site but without affecting traffic too much. On the other sites, we simply did 301 redirects from the .com page to the corresponding .co.uk page. Any ideas?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AllAboutGroup0 -
Site Footer Links Used for Keyword Spam
I was on the phone with a proposed web relaunch firm for one of my clients listening to them talk about their deep SEO knowledge. I cannot believe that this wouldn’t be considered black-hat or at least very Spammy in which case a client could be in trouble. On this vendor’s site I notice that they stack the footer site map with about 50 links that are basically keywords they are trying to rank for. But here’s the kicker shown by way of example from one of the themes in the footer: 9 footer links:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RosemaryB
Top PR Firms
Best PR Firms
Leading PR Firms
CyberSecurity PR Firms
Cyber Security PR Firms
Technology PR Firms
PR Firm
Government PR Firms
Public Sector PR Firms Each link goes to a unique URL that is basically a knock-off of the homepage with a few words or at the most one sentences swapped out to include this footer link keyword phrase, sometimes there is a different title attribute but generally they are a close match to each other. The canonical for each page links back to itself. I simply can’t believe Google doesn’t consider this Spammy. Interested in your view.
Rosemary0 -
'SEO Footers'
We have an internal debate going on right now about the use of a link list of SEO pages in the footer. My stance is that they serve no purpose to people (heatmaps consistently show near zero activity), therefore they shouldn't be used. I believe that if something on a website is user-facing, then it should also beneficial to a user - not solely there for bots. There are much better ways to get bots to those pages, and for those people who didn't enter through an SEO page, internal linking where appropriate will be much more effective at getting them there. However, I have some opposition to this theory and wanted to get some community feedback on the topic. Anyone have thoughts, experience, or data to share on this subject?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LoganRay1 -
Suspicious external links to site have 302 redirects
Hi, I have been asked to look at a site where I suspect some questionable SEO work, particularly link building. The site does seem to be performing very poorly in Google since January 2014, although there are no messages in WMT. Using WMT, OPenSiteExplorer, Majestic & NetPeak, I have analysed inbound links and found a group of links which although are listed in WMT, etc appear to 302 redirect to a directory in China (therefore the actual linking domain is not visible). It looks like a crude type of link farm, but I cant understand why they would use 302s not 301s. The domains are not visible due to redirects. Should I request a disavow or ignore? The linking domains are listed below: http://www.basalts.cn/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | crescentdigital
http://www.chinamarbles.com.cn/
http://www.china-slate.com.cn/
http://www.granitecountertop.com.cn/
http://www.granite-exporter.com/
http://www.sandstones.biz/
http://www.stone-2.com/
http://www.stonebuild.cn/
http://www.stonecompany.com.cn/
http://www.stonecontact.cn/
http://www.stonecrate.com/
http://www.stonedesk.com/
http://www.stonedvd.com/
http://www.stonepark.cn/
http://www.stonetool.com.cn/
http://www.stonewebsite.com/ Thanks Steve0 -
Is guest posting good for main link-building tactic for eCommerce site
Hello, Is guest posting going to be devalued? We've been offering a guest post with one link in the body pointing towards one of our articles, and one home page link in the bio. We're looking at doing this as the main link building strategy. Is this still a good idea now and in the future? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Negative SEO impacting client rankings - How to combat negative linking?
I have a client which have been losing rankings for the key term "sell gold" in Google AU. However, while doing some investigating I realized that we have been receiving links from bad neighborhoods such as porn, bogus .edu sites as well as some pharmaceutical sites. We have identified this as negative SEO and have moved forward to disavow the links in Google. However, I would like to know what other measures can be taken to combat this type of negative SEO linking? Any suggestions would be appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dancape0 -
Is my SEO consultant doing blackhat tactic?
Hi, Can someone tell me what my SEO consultant is doing? I have engaged a SEO company in Singapore for my site: Http://www.rollerblinds.com.sg The thing is for the 1st 2 months, it is ranking well but for the next 4 months it is out of google. I noticed my links are on some strange article site. Is he doing blackhat tactic, I have been paying monthly for many months now with no result. Shall I continue to pay and how can I recover?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | chanel270 -
Help for a complete SEO newbie!
Hi all, I've just joined seomoz today to try and further my very young education on SEO. My major problem is i need my site to rank high in local search engines but feel that none of the customers read much of the content as i am a landscaper and feel they just search "landscaping in Newcastle" and are immediatly looking for a contact number to arrange a free estimate. I dont do any online sales, its just to generate leads. I've spent alot of time building a better site than my local competitors but they still out rank me on alot of keywords i.e. "Driveways in Gateshead" My question is do i keep adding more and more content hoping this will work long term or do i link build with anchor text etc or both? I cannot believe they still out rank me when i feel i have more links more anchor text and a load more origional content and images. I think it may be that my site is still under 1 year old. I feel i am boucing from content to link building then trying something else without any real knowlegde of what i really should be doing or what should be the priority at this young stage for my site. I have managed to get on page 1 of google for most of my keywords in local searches ( obviously not national) but still feel its been more down to luck and effort than actually knowing what i am doing when it comes to site and offsite optimization Any help, tips etc would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks John
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | totaldriveways0