Negative SEO + Disavow
-
My site is very new (~1 years old), but due to good PR we have gotten some decent links and are already ranking for a key term.
This may be why someone decided to start a negative SEO attack on us.
We've had less than 200 linking domains up until 2 weeks ago, but since then we have been getting 100+ new domains /day with anchor texts that are either targeted to that key term or are from porn websites.
I've gone through the links to get ready and submit a disavow... but should I do it?
My rankings/site traffic has not been affected yet.
Reasons for my hesitations:
1. Google always warns against using the disavow, and says "you shouldn't have to use it if you are a normal website." (sensing 'guilty-until-proven')
2. Some say Google is only trying to get the data to see if there are any patterns within the linking sites. I don't want the site owners to get hurt, since the villain is someone else using xrumer to put spammy comments on their site.
What would you do?
-
Thanks everyone!
-
This is also worth a read and watch the short video where you will get your answer from the 'horses mouth' (English term!)
http://searchengineland.com/googles-cutts-got-bad-links-to-your-site-dont-fret-it-disavow-it-169131
-
+1 to everything that Robert said. I wanted to add this info from John Muller at a Webmaster Central Hangout. You can see the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEAQyHtRQxg and start watching at 23:30.
Someone asks John about a situation where a competitor is pointing thousands of spammy links at them a day. John says that the algorithm is pretty good at ignoring those links but says that it may be a good idea to disavow them just in case.
One thing that I have found though is that a lot of people who think that they are under a negative SEO attack really just have a normal backlink profile. Prior to Penguin, the average webmaster would not go through their links with the scrutiny that they utilize today. You would be surprised of the kind of junk that is in the backlink profile of most sites, even if they have not done any link building!
-
Alice,
Without more data and something visual it is hard to say what I would do. Are you sure the links are from 100 different domains a day? Versus 100 links from a domain or two? I am only asking for clarity sake.
If there is a way to give us a screenshot it would help. Short of that, I would say if you are not being affected yet, look in GWMT and see if the bad links are showing there yet. If they are not, that may be the reason. (With ahrefs for example, you will pick up the links long before Google does.) If it begins to affect performance, I would use the disavow tool to block them. I realize it is a lot of work, but I have seen a major client get hit by bad links and have helped them using the disavow tool.
What you are stating re the tool and Google's warning needs some balance - Google states that it can harm your site's performance. An example would be someone being over worried and they disavow 75% of their links, they are likely to fall in ranking.
As to: "you shouldn't have to use it if you are a normal website" is not a guilty until proven statement IMO. It is actually Google stating you should not just have use it willy nilly. This is from Google:
The disavow backlinks tool should be used with caution since it can potentially harm your site's performance. However, if you see a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links point to your site, and you're confident that the links are causing issues for your site, you can use the disavow tool to disavow those links. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool.
So, watch your WMT and the sites ranking and other performance measures. If you see an effect, do not be afraid to take action.
Hope this helps a bit.
Robert
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
-
Disavowing a .edu
I have a backlink that I found from http://onucdm.onu.edu/mt/hmlref/2010/10/see_below.html . . . it is a nofollow, so it doesn't seem to be doing much harm. But this is obviously spam. It is from a .edu, so I'm not sure what I should do. Think it's harming my site at all? In general, how do you determine what to disavow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KevinViner0 -
Using disavow tool for 404s
Hey Community, Got a question about the disavow tool for you. My site is getting thousands of 404 errors from old blog/coupon/you name it sites linking to our old URL structure (which used underscores and ended in .jsp). It seems like the webmasters of these sites aren't answering back or haven't updated their sites in ages so it's returning 404 errors. If I disavow these domains and/or links will it clear out these 404 errors in Google? I read the GWT help page on it, but it didn't seem to answer this question. Feel free to ask any questions that may help you understand the issue more. Thanks for your help,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby
-Reed0 -
International SEO Question
_The company I work for has a website www.example.com that ranks very well in English speaking countries - US, UK, CA. For legal reasons, we now need to create www.example.co.uk to be accessible and rank in google.co.uk. Obviously we want this change to be as smooth as possible with little effect on rankings in the UK. We have two options that we're talking through at the moment - Use the hreflang tag on both the .com and the .co.uk to tell Google which site to rank in each country. My worry with this is that we might lose our rankings in the UK as it will be a brand new site with little to no links pointing to it. 301 redirect to the .co.uk based on UK IP addresses. I'm skeptical about this. As a 301 passes most of the link juice, I'm not sure how Google would treat this type of thing - would the .com lose ranking? So my questions are - would we lose ranking in the UK if we use option 1? Would option 2 work? What would you do? Any help is appreciated._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | awestwood0 -
SEO Priorities for Ecommerce Sites
Hello All! What is the best way to rank SEO tasks by PRIORITY for Ecommerce sites to improve?? It can be quite overwhelming with all the types of projects/tasks needed to improve organic rankings... How would you rank the most CRITICAL tasks to spend the MOST TIME on to the tasks you spend less on. Appreciate your input in advance 🙂 Thank you! Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickerparadise0 -
How do you Hire someone for SEO?
What questions do you ask when hiring an SEO person? What is the most important thing in selecting a company for SEO? Should they be able to make recommendations on changes in your website for seo?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Realtor1010 -
Hyphen domain effect SEO?
Hi Guys, I am looking to buy some domain that have the keyword I want in - but my question is; Does using hypehns in a domain effect your SEO? Thanks Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
Need Guidance On SEO Campaign
Hello, my website is www.mybluedish.com and I am launching an SEO campaign to increase our rankings, especially for the keyword 'satellite internet'. We used to be ranked #5 for this keyword and Google made some changes about 9 months ago that dropped us way back. We have recovered a lot back to #18 now, but have been stuck here for a while. I want to step up our SEO campaign and have come up with the following campaign. Could any SEO's please tell me if you think the following is the make up of a solid SEO campaign or if it should be adjusted? Thank you. 12 new blog articles/month 24 Articles submitted to 10 different directories each (total of 200 article directory submissions)/month 1 basic Press Release from PR.com/month 200 do follow blog comments/month 10 paid blog posts (on other people’s blogs of PR 1-5)/month
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0 -
SEO for Global Navigations
I did my first SEO audit from the book SEO Secrets by Danny Dover on my new website at http://melo4.melotec.com:4010/ In the book he says to disable Javascript and see if the global navigation still works. So when I did that the dropdown menus in my navigation don't show. I'm assuming this is a problem but when I check the cache text only version of the site, the dropdowns are in the text only version. Are their any experienced SEO's out their who can weigh in on this issue? Should I have my developer redo the navigation without any javascript? Thanks, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Romancing0