Hit by Negative SEO
-
I've seen some discussion here about whether or not negative seo is real.
I've just spent 6 months recovering from Penguin, rewriting content, removing hundreds of bad links, and seeing our traffic slowly improve.
Yesterday we noticed in Google webmasters tools that we're ranking for the term "Free Sex." Here... http://screencast.com/t/ezoo2sCRXQ
Now we have discovered that thousands of "sex" links have been directed at our improving domain. I am convinced I know who the culprit is.
What would you advise a client to do in my situation?
Forget about removing these damn links. I don't have the time, money or energy to go through that again. I'm sure he can add them much faster than I can ever remove them.
Is the disavow tool best answer in this case? Or is there an international court of seo justice that I can appeal to?
-
Just a followup to this old thread for anyone working through similar issues.
We are monitoring what Google finds through their "Download Latest Links." We add the domains where the bad links are to the Disavow Links tool.
Google no longer ranks the site for any "sex" terms. No warnings have been issued to the site in 4 months. Things are stable at the moment, but we're going to be picking the lint out of this link list for a long time.
-
So send a note to the webspam team? I'm not into public shaming. I don't think these guys have any shame.
It's pretty obvious to me based on my history with a certain company. There's only about four of us in this particular niche. Lo and behold, only 3 of us were spammed ( I saw in some of the web spam that 2 other competitors were often linked to from the same page). They targeted a very specific page on my site, so that tells me clearly the keywords they are trying to knock me down for. Given this other company's history of aggressive tactics (spamming our blog posts, spamming comments on shareware sites where we are listed, spamming our ratings and simultaneously saying their product is better, building out dozens of EMD sites, etc etc), given that some of the spam was in their native language, and that I recognize some of the aliases they have used in the past, I have a pretty strong hunch I know who I'm dealing with.
My hope is that nothing happens to my serp so they won't be encouraged to keep doing it. That's the real danger I see; if it works, certainly they'll keep doing it.
-
That's an awesome idea. It wouldn't be difficult for them to algorithmically verify that your site is totally not relevant for a given query.
-
Thanks for the feedback everyone.
I spent about 5 hours yesterday picking out bad links from good, and sent them to Google through their disavow tool.
I wondered how this could happen (I guess I live in Candy Land) and it took me about 2 minutes to find people on Fiverr selling 25,000 "bad links" for $5. That's scary, and it seems Google has wrought this with Penguin. I can't work this hard everytime someone wants to spend $5.
My hope is that my site withstands the attack. So far so good, really, but it sure is annoying when you're trying hard to clean things up and do the right thing going forward.
Maybe Google should offer a Disavow Query tool, whereby you could tell it if certain queries are misdirecting traffic to your site. That way I could let them know at the front end that my site has nothing to do with "free sex."
-
Brian and IPRO both suggest that you use the disavow links tool that Google recently rolled out. That may wind up being the answer in the long run but Matt Cutts, in a recent GoogleWebmasterHelp video, seems to stress the fact that this tool should be used after exhausting other link-removal attempts.
Barry, over at seroundtable, has a straight forward write up about this on his blog and even includes a sample (quoted below) of what it is he thinks Google is looking for in a disavow action.
Here is a link to the specific article I am speaking of: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-disavow-link-tool-15848.html
I know you want a quick and relatively painless fix, but Google tends to be vague in that regard and I doubt, unfortunately, that such a fix exists in a situation like this.
*Contact those who run the sites where the links are coming from, and keep a record of your interaction with them.
*E-mail all relevant parties until you get some sort of answer, positive or negative. If you get no response make a note of that.
*Contact Google with a spam report (probably won't get a non-automated response quickly or at all), and make a note of your report submissions/
*If none of these, or other methods I am sure I must be leaving out, solve the issue, format and submit a detailed disavow file.
WIsh I could offer the silver bullet but, as far as I am aware, that bullet has yet to exist.
-
" I am convinced I know who the culprit is." I would tell a client to spend a bit of time sleuthing for evidence to corroborate that confident assertion. If you can flesh out a very strong case, I would then take it to Google spam team, and possibly talk to an attorney about sending a "we're on to you" letter. There's no criminal case, but a civil judgment need only show that they took actions that hurt you. The mere act of calling them out and threatening a suit will probably stop the abuse (well, unless you're dealing with a sociopath).
Definitely disavow the toxic links when necessary though...
-
Yeah, I'd agree with that - disavow sounds like a good bet.
-
If you're 100% sure who did it, and you're willing to put yourself out there and name-and-shame, you can do that. I'm not sure that's in your best interests, though. I would just keep a close eye on the situation and disavow aggressively.
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
-
The Importance of Bold Keywords in SEO?
Hi all, Recently I came cross an RV lifestyle blog named RVing Trends. The website features high-quality contents about handy RV camping tips & guides, and in-depth RV product reviews. They seem to spend a lot of effort on the content quality. I've followed this website for a few months and can see they've been producing 3,000-5,000 word length contents regularly. One thing I notice is that they emphasize the main keyword as bold in almost the posts. You can check 1 sample here about RV mattress reviews. Just want to ask for your opinions about the efficiency of this technique and is the keyword density still important for blog content to rank well in Google. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TungNM1930 -
Pharma Hack/Grey hat SEO. Cannot get site to rank, tons of incoming bad links
I have been working on a website trying to get it to show up in the SERPs again. It is being indexed which is great, it has some errors that I'm fixing now. But for the most part it should be ranking. It don't show any penalties going on, but when I did a backlink search we keep getting the cialis, viagra etc inbound links. First thought was Pharma Hack. But it's not a WP site and I recently rebuilt it. So whatever bad code could have been there it's not anymore. It doesn't show up in google either for the search site:www.mysite.com viagra cialis etc... So I'm wondering if anyone has any insight in a direction to point me? I don't understand what would be causing this to still not rank. Only thing it ranks for is it's name. Any suggestions would be very appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WeBuyCars.com0 -
Effect of same country server hosting on SEO
Hello all, my question is if my website targets a country abc and I have server in the same country abc compared to suppose I shift my server to country xyz can it effect SEO and ranking of my website ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | adnan11010 -
Competitor Bad Practice SEO Still Ranking Well But Why ?
Moz Friends, A very close competitor have always been challenging for similar competitive keywords. We seem to have the advantage for alot of long tail keywords but on one of the higher traffic relevant keywords they seem to do well. I really struggle to understand why, particularly with the back links they use Just my thoughts and notes on the two: Our Page Better written text content (Maybe slightly written to for experienced target audience but we are working on simplifying things) Good Clear site URL structure and navigation for usability Fresh content updates Mobile optimized Reasonable page speeds Good on-page optimization Good back links from industry influences Competitor Page Negatives Site structure and URL's are inconsistent and messy Lower quality content site wide They use tried and tested on page optimization methods like Keyword spamming, Bold Keywords,Underlining Keywords (Sarcasm) Terrible back links, all directories and free article submission sites (Seriously take a look) Less focused on page optimization Not mobile optimized Most of the rest of the sites carry on the same sort of differences, Engine: www.google.co.uk Keyword: Sound level meters **Our Page: **www.cirrusresearch.co.uk/products/sound-level-meters/ **Competitor Page: **www.pulsarinstruments.com/product-information/Sound-Level-Meter.html Any feedback would be greatly appreciated please, i am really struggling to get my head around this Thanks James
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Antony_Towle1 -
Does IP Blacklist cause SEO issues?
Hi, Our IP was recently blacklisted - we had a malicious script sending out bulk mail in a Joomla installation. Does it hurt our SEO if we have a domain hosted on that IP? Any solid evidence? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Learn Local SEO
What are best local SEO practices 2013 ?? to get website on top of all major keywords ???
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mnkpso0 -
Hello i have been hit for external links
Hello my web has been hit for external links maybe because of the work of SEO consultants y had before. The web name is http://www.propdental.com Some seo consultants will try to use the disalow tools on webmaster tools other recomends to do another web with the content wich is very rich and start over again with a new domain I would like to know what is your opinion thank you very much
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Vendor Descriptions for SEO... Troublesome?
Howdy! I have been tossing this idea around in my head over the weekend and I cannot decide which answer is correct, so here I am! We a retailer of products and is currently in the midst of redesigning our site-- not only design but also content. The issue that we are facing is with product descriptions from our vendors. We are able to access the product descriptions/specs from their websites and use them on ours, but my worry is that we will get tagged for duplicate content. Other retailers (as well as the vendors) are using this content as well, so I don't want this to have an adverse effect on our ranking. There are so many products that it would be a large feat to re-write unique content-- not to mention that the majority of the rhetoric would be extremely similar. What have you seen in your experiences in similar situations? Is it bad to use the descriptions? Or do we need to bite the bullet and do our best to re-write hundreds of product descriptions? Or is there a way to use the descriptions and tag it in a way that won't have Google penalize us? I originally thought that if we have enough other unique content on our site, that it shouldn't be as big of a deal, but then I realized how much of our site's structure is our actual products. Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jpretz0