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
-
Dodgy backlinks pointing to my website - someone trying to ruin my SEO rankings?
I just saw in 'Just discovered' section of MOZ that 2 new backlinks have appeared back to my website - www.isacleanse.com.au from spammy websites which look like they might be associated with inappropriate content. 1. http://laweba.net/opinion-y-tecnologia/css-naked-day/comment-page-53/ peepshow says: (peepshow links off to my site)07/17/2016 at 8:55 pm2. http://omfglol.org/archives/9/comment-page-196 voyeur says: (voyeur linking off to my site)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IsaCleanse
July 17, 2016 at 7:58 pm Any ideas if this is someone trying to send me negative SEO and best way to deal with it?0 -
SEO Template Recommendations - example provided but would welcome any advice
Hi there, I'm trying to improve the templates used on our website for SEO pages aimed at popular search terms. An example of our current page template is as follows: http://www.eteach.com/teaching-jobs Our designers have come up with the following new template: http://www.eteach.com/justindaviesnovemeber I know that changing successful pages can be risky. One concern is putting links behind JQuery, where the 'More on Surrey' link is. Does anyone had any strong suggestions or observations around our new template? Especially through the eyes of Google! Thanks in advance Justin
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
What is your SEO agency doing in terms of link building for clients?
What are you or your SEO agency doing for your client's link building efforts? What are you (or the agency) doing yourself, or out-sourcing, or having the client do for link building? If a new client needs some serious link building done, what do you prescribe and implement straight off the bat? What are your go-to link building tactics for clients? What are the link building challenges faced by your agency in 2013/2014? What's working for your agency and what's not? Does your agency work closely with the client's marketing department to gain link traction? If so, what are collaborating on? What else might you be willing to share about your agencies link building practices? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Many Regional Pages: Bad for SEO?
Hello Moz-folks We are relatively well listed for "Edmonton web design." - the city we work out of. As an effort to reach out new clients, we created about 15 new pages targeting other cites in Alberta, BC and Saskatchewan. Although we began to show up quite well in some of these regions, we have recently seen our rankings in Edmonton drop by a few spots. I'm wondering if setting up regional pages that have lots of keywords for that region can be detrimental to our overall rankings.Here is one example of a regional page: http://www.web3.ca/red-deer-web-design Thanks, Anton TWeb3 Marketing Inc.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Web3Marketing870 -
Local SEO
My website was ranked on top of all keywords on Google Local results but in january 2013 it has droped to 2nd page on all keywords. After my checking i had found keyword staffing on place page which i have removed two months back. During last two months site was on 2nd page but now it is dropping more. Website is listed on all major local directories. What is the best way to handle such website case for local seo to get back rankings ??? what should be our new plan or strategy ??? I will be very thankful to all of you for best suggestion.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mnkpso0 -
Seo back linking proposal review
Hi guys, below is a proposal i received from someone on freelancer.com for some seo building. Is this really all it takes? Obviously done overtime but basically is this it aside from the usual basics onsite keywords, urls, artciles, content etc. This is a the proposal for $250 (some are cheaper but almost the same details as below). This is one of the top seo people on freelancers.com and they all have good reviews. Is this basically it? Shell out $100 bucks or more a month to someone who will just post stuff all over the internet. It just seems all very simple, what is $100 bucks a month to stay at #1. Is there any real questions i should ask to make sure i am not just throwing my money away? I would like to recommend the following services for attaining better search results for the website. 1)Press Release Submissions
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | topclass
2)Social bookmarking submissions
3)Drip Feed Article Links - 100 Article submissions everyday for 25 days
4)Article directory submissions
5)Link directory submissions
6)Blog Post Submissions(All Blogs have PR1 to PR6)
7)Wiki Page Submissions(.EDU and .GOV Sites Included) PR of the directories, social bookmarking websites, Blogs, wiki pages and Article directories are from PR0 to PR8.
Most of them are in the range of PR1 to PR4. If you are interested in the above services then these are the details about those services. 1)Press release Submissions - We will write 3 press release and submit them to 25 press release websites.
Submitting press release gets the news to Google news, Yahoo news etc..
Please note we even submit to Paid press release websites like PRBuzz, SBWire, pressdoc etc.. 2)Social Bookmarking submissions - I will also submit your website to 150 social bookmarking websites.
Here are the example of social bookmarking websites.
www.digg.com
www.furl.net
After we finish submitting to social bookmarking websites we will then create rss feeds with approved link URL's and ping them so that links get indexed. 3)Drip Feed Article submissions - We will be writing one article.
Everyday we will submitting the article to 100 different websites.
We will be submitting for 25 days.
100 submissions x 25 days = 2500 submissions.
In each article submissions we can use 2 links to the website. 4)Article directory submissions - We will write 5 articles.
Each article will be around 500 words.
Then we will submit them to 300 different article directories. That means 5 articles x 300 article directories = 1500 article submissions.
In each article we can use 2 links to the website.
1500 x 2 Links.
I have experience in submitting articles to article directories.
Till now i have submitted more than 1000 articles to article directories.
I will also create separate accounts with article directories wherever possible. 5)Link directory submissions - I have a list of 1300 directories.
I will submit your website to these directories.
I have experience in submitting to link directories.
Till now i have submitted more than 2500 websites.
All the submission work is done manually.
All these directories provide one way links. 6)Blog Post Submissions(700 PR1 to PR6 Blogs) - We will write 1 article.
we spin and post to 700 PR1 to PR5 blogs.
We can spin the article, title of article and links
You will be given a confirmation when complete, and a code to search backlinks in the search engines.
They are hosted on 650 different C Class IPs! 7)Wiki Page Submissions - Get 200+ wiki site contextual backlinks (3 per posted article) from a range of PR 0 to 8 wiki sites including over 30 US .EDU and US .GOV sites.
I will also ping Them.0 -
On page SEO? (This is good! I promise)
I have been doing some research on onsite optimization and I hit a dead end, need some help with OnSite.... These three I get for the most part... (If you would like to add anything please do) Title optimization - needs to be unique with keywords included under 90 words Meta description - needs to be unique with keywords included under 150 words Meta keywords – all keywords Questions begin here... H1 headings – Should this be the first thing the spider crawls? Should they be unique? Is there a penalty for having this content the same on every page? (H1s are under the logo at the top of every one of my sites pages) H2-H6 headings – Should they be unique? Is there a penalty for having this content the same on every page? Bold text – does this matter for SEO? Italic text - does this matter for SEO? Link anchor text – These are the same on most pages. However, most of these links are part of the navigation, does this matter for SEO? is this duplicate? how does the search engine analyze this data? Image alt attributes – I have the share image buttons on my site (Facebook, Twitter, etc...) and they have the same alt attributes on each page. Does this matter for SEO? Body text – I found a competitor site that’s ranking #1 for a key term. This competitor has 11,106 words in their body with the keyword mentioned 29 times (0.8%). They placed all this text in a small scroll down on the bottom of their page. Its strange how they included it. Please review attached image. the competitor URL is http://www(dot)1804design(dot)com/ w6AiM.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Recovering From Black Hat SEO Tactics
A client recently engaged my service to deliver foundational white hat SEO. Upon site audit, I discovered a tremendous amount of black hat SEO tactics employed by their former SEO company. I'm concerned that the efforts of the old company, including forum spamming, irrelevant backlink development, exploiting code vulnerabilities on BB's and other messy practices, could negatively influence the target site's campaigns for years to come. The site owner handed over hundreds of pages of paperwork from the old company detailing their black hat SEO efforts. The sheer amount of data is insurmountable. I took just one week of reports and tracked back the links to find that 10% of the accounts were banned, 20% tagged as abusive, some of the sites were shut down completely, WOT reports of abusive practices and mentions on BB control programs of blacklisting for the site. My question is simple. How does one mitigate the negative effects of old black hat SEO efforts and move forward with white hat solutions when faced with hundreds of hours of black gunk to clean up. Is there a clean way to eliminate the old efforts without contacting every site administrator and requesting removal of content/profiles? This seems daunting, but my client is a wonderful person who got in over her head, paying for a service that she did not understand. I'd really like to help her succeed. Craig Cook
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOptPro
http://seoptimization.pro
info@seoptimization.pro0