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!
-
Hi Melanie,
If your competitor is doing Negative SEO to your site, I believe the only option is to use the Disavow Link Tool. Pointing low-quality links to competitor's site is the most common method of Negative SEO and i believe that is one of the reason why Google rolled out the Disavow Tool.
If you are having trouble determining which links are low-quality, Matt Cutts recommends two ways:
-
Use the Webmaster Tool to sort the links by date and compare it to when you received the Unnatural Link Email from Google. This help you determine which few links are unnatural comparing the date and time.
-
In the email that Google sends you, sometimes they try to include samples to give you an idea what is unnatural.
My 2 cents.
-
-
Hi,
Negative SEO is in effect only if you receive an un-natural message in Web master Tolls (so a manual penalty) or if you get an algo filter applied (the only one for links si penguin).
So if you didn't receive any messages from google via Web master Tools and Penguin is not in effect - that means there is no current issue with Negative SEO - so the drop in rankings is not really from this bad links you are seeing.
There is one other possibility - when those bad links started to pop up you might have seen an increase in rankings and traffic and and after some time google spot those bad links and cut them out (by cut them out I mean ignore those - they don't matter in your ranking process). if that was the case after the push up you wills ee a drop - to previous levels.
You can check that with a visibility tool to see if the patterns applies to you or post the url and some of us can have a look.
My 2 cents. Hope it helps.
-
Further to Heathers quite correct comments... You also have to keep an eye on the latest links tab in Google Webmaster Tools. It is also worth posting a reconsideration request as a preventative measure if there has been a large influx of spammy links.
-
Melanie, yesterday I watched a video by Matt Cutts explaining that the disavow tool is your best bet when it comes to combating negative SEO. It's frustrating though because it takes a bit of time to come into effect.
Good luck.
Heather
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
-
How do you deal with Scam-Type SEO businesses?
One of our potential clients is a limousine rental service. His current "Marketer" is going about his business in a seemingly sketchy way. I'm pretty new to having to compare myself to other SEO/Marketing competition. So, this guy has 100's of websites that are nearly identical. Quite a few have duplicate content, but all of them generally look the same. He leases these websites as lead generators: Think of it like this: he probably has 15-20 websites all geared for different parts of the DFW area. Denton Limo Service, Plano Limo Service, Dallas Limo Service, Etc. He also has a bunch of websites for other industries. Every "business" has its own phone number via a Google Number that he forwards to the actual business line. Every "business" has a Google My Business Listing setup as well with no address listed. When someone fills out the contact form on one of these sites, it is forwarded to the business who is leasing it. He also creates his own backlinks on his websites to all of his other websites. I imagine that eventually he will be caught, right? I mean, this has to be Black Hat SEO. Have any of you encountered an SEO/Marketer like this? If so, what do you do about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | roger2050 -
Do Wikipedia links add value?
Do Wikipedia pages/links add any value to your website and SEO? We are not an advertiser or seller of products, whereas we help people with planning so say I add an external link from an established page relevant to our service, will we get penalised by Wikipedia? Or is it worth setting up a page about our company, similar to say - the BBC with an external link? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jaybeamer0 -
Victim of Negative SEO - Can I Redirect the Attacked Page to an External Site?
My site has been a victim of Negative SEO. During the course of 3 weeks, I have received over 3000 new backlinks from 200 referring domains (based on Ahref report). All links are pointing to just 1 page (all other pages within the site are unaffected). I have already disavowed as many links as possible from Ahref report, but is that all I can do? What if I continue to receive bad backlinks? I'm thinking of permanently redirecting the affected page to an external website (a dummy site), and hope that all the juice from the bad backlinks will be transferred to that site. Do you think this would be a good practice? I don't care much about keeping the affected page on my site, but I want to make sure the bad backlinks don't affect the entire site. The bad backlinks started to come in around 3 weeks ago and the rankings haven't been affected yet. The backlinks are targeting one single keyword and are mostly comment backlinks and trackbacks. Would appreciate any suggestions 🙂 Howard
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | howardd0 -
Homepage bombed from rankings 2
I've had some varying advice on here regarding the best way to proceed with [i'll PM the URL] which was hit by Penguin 2.0. There were previous issues with the homepage and before the 22nd had started creating new decent links. Some have suggested to ditch the domain and start again. There are several reasons not to and branding is the deciding factor at this stage. I'm going down the route of initially trying to manually remove links and then follow on with disavow. I would really appreciate another pair of eyes taking a quick look to see if i'm missing anything other than a dodgy link profile.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Which links should I remove?
What is your general approach when removing links for a new client? Just taken on some new work and found links that I wouldn't dream of building now (unrelated domain name, blogroll, single word, exact match anchor, dead sites). However some of these are brand anchor links, and some of the pages have decent Page Rank (2/3/4). Obviously I don't want to remove links that might actually be helping the site in a weird way. It would be good to get an idea of other peoples approach to link removal - what goes, what stays etc?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Coolpink0 -
UK SEO Agency Recommendations
Hi, I am currently looking for a new SEO agency to manage strategies on 3 websites, budget of about £15k pm in total. Any recommendations would be really appreciated as trying to navigate through all the usual sales waffle and hollow promises of most SEO agencies is becoming rather difficult. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | cewe0 -
Have I created link spam.....
Howdy fellow Mozzers.... Since Googles Penguin Update I am overly cautious when reviewing our link profile. I spotted 2 domains linking to us yesterday, 80+ links from each domain to our homepage. This looked superstitious, site wide links effectively. At first inspection I couldn't spot the links....they turned out to be two individual comments, but as the site had a plugin with "most recent comments", 1 link became 80. The link is an exact match of the individuals name who made the comment. And is a result of filling out the comment form. Name: Website: Comment: By filling out the name and website the name becomes the anchor text for the link to the website. Long story short...do you think this is penguin esq. link spam? Is it not? Or is it just not worth the risk and remove them anyway???
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
Is this SEO correct?
Please view website http://www.staddonsbeds.co.uk. In the footer is the keywords the client is aiming for. These pages have been created separately to the sitemap. Is this tactic and pages white hat seo or is this considered black hat seo such as gateway pages? Could you please confirm Thanks Paul
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | paulbaguley0