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
-
Do home page carry more seo benefit than other pages?
hi, i would like to include my kws in the URL and they are under 50 characters. is there anything in the algo that tells engines to give more importance to homepage?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | alan-shultis0 -
SEO results hacked?
Hi there, Since last Saturday I noticed a big traffic drop on at least the following two pages:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarcelMoz
http://www.smartphonehoesjes.nl/apple/ and http://www.smartphonehoesjes.nl/apple/iphone-6/. I did some research and I noticed something realy strange. Unknown sites seems to hijacked my organic results by using the exact same page title and META description but leading traffic to another their domain. Look at those pictures: http://imgur.com/v6kglLU and http://imgur.com/Whx4l8K. Edit: a competitor seems to have a same problem: http://imgur.com/Zzhter4. I just fetched both URL's in GWT as Google. In Bing there is a little sign of this problem too, so this is not a Google only thing. Can anybody please help me here? This has cost me some real money since Saturday. Tnx in advance. Marcel0 -
Will Removing My Keyword from Breadcrumb Title to Simplify UI Hurt Page SEO?
Working on the UI of a new site and I would like to simplify the breadcrumbs so they do not take up as much space. They will still communicate the same message to user. See example below: Before: Home > Widget Dealers > Tennessee > Nashville After: Home > Dealers > Tennessee > Nashville The page title and/or menu item would still be "Widget Dealers". So my question is, if I remove the keyword "Widget" only from the breadcrumb could that hurt me in any way?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | the-coopersmith1 -
Should we remove our "index" pages (alphabetical link list to all of the products on the site)?
We run an e-commerce site with a large number of product families, with each family having a number of products within it. We have a set of pages (26 - one for each letter A-Z) that are lists of links to the product family pages. We originally created these pages thinking it would aid in discoverability of these pages to search engines, of course as time has gone on, techniques like this have fallen out of favor with Google as it provides negligible value to the user. Should we consider removing these pages from the site overall? Is it possible that it could be viewed by Panda as resembling a link farm? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ChrisRoberts-MTI1 -
Best Link Building Strategies in Modern SEO
Hello, In light of all the updates and also in guest blogging being only for nofollow links now, what's some of the best strategies for link building for ecommerce sites? We're in an industry where the content doesn't get linked to very much. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Negative SEO and when to use to Dissavow tool?
Hi guys I was hoping someone could help me on a problem that has arisen on the site I look after. This is my first SEO job and I’ve had it about 6 months now. I think I’ve been doing the right things so far building quality links from reputable sites with good DA and working with bloggers to push our products as well as only signing up to directories in our niche. So our backlink profile is very specific with few spammy links. Over the last week however we have received a huge increase in backlinks which has almost doubled our linking domains total. I’ve checked the links out from webmaster tools and they are mainly directories or webstat websites like the ones below | siteinfo.org.uk deperu.com alestat.com domaintools.com detroitwebdirectory.com ukdata.com stuffgate.com | We’ve also just launched a new initiative where we will be producing totally new and good quality content 4-5 times a week and many of these new links are pointing to that page which looks very suspicious to me. Does this look like negative Seo to anyone? I’ve read a lot about the disavow tool and it seems people’s opinions are split on when to use it so I was wondering if anyone had any advice on whether to use it or not? It’s easy for me to identify what these new links are, yet some of them have decent DA so will they do any harm anyway? I’ve also checked the referring anchors on Ahrefs and now over 50% of my anchor term cloud are totally unrelated terms to my site and this has happened over the last week which also worries me. I haven’t seen any negative impact on rankings yet but if this carries on it will destroy my link profile. So would it be wise to disavow all these links as they come through or wait to see if they actually have an impact? It should be obvious to Google that there has been a huge spike in links so then the question is would they be ignored or will I be penalised. Any ideas? Thanks in advance Richard
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Rich_9950 -
Is there any value in "starting from scratch" on a new domain?
Hi, Our ecommerce store - we have had some duplicate content issues and they have been corrected, but of course, Google takes time to pick up on these. Our link profile is very poor, so we wont lose a lot by going to a new domain in that sense. My question is, in what instances is it worthwhile starting under a new domain? And in which not? Presumably you can also 301 the whole site - when is it worth doing this or not? Thanks, Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Has anyone been able to recover a site from that was slapped by panda?
I have a client that the only thing I can determine is over optimization of a couple anchor terms which the person no longer ranks for..I tried mixing up with brandname , brandname.com and a diversity of links but nothing seems to budge anyone have a similar problem?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | foreignhaus0