Negative SEO

by Topkat325

Posted: 7 years ago 20 replies

Hi,

My website is being attacked with negative SEO and it's been going on for over a year now. My homepage has been kicked off it's #1 position for my domain name search. Someone is building 1000s of bad links to my website every week. I've been adding the links to the disavow file, but my rankings are still dropping. They are copying text from my website and spamming it all over the Internet too. I've been reporting it to Google but Google doesn't seem to care.

Recently I logged into AddThis.com, and I saw two of my competitor's domain names in the list of domain's that have run my AddThis code as well as some other domain's that I'm not familiar with.

I emailed AddThis to ask why I am seeing other people's domain names in my AddThis dashboard and they wrote: "Pages appear in your AddThis analytics when your unique snippet of JavaScript is detected on a page and that page receives traffic."

So my competitors and these other domains must have copied some of my website's code or just the AddThis code and put it on their own website. Why do you think they would do that? Should I email them and ask why? Could they be behind the negative SEO attack or maybe their site was hacked?

I also noticed that a sub-domain that does not exist on my website is in the list of domains on the AddThis dashboard. If I try to visit this sub-domain (fake.example.com), I get a 404 which is correct because the sub-domain doesn't exist. So why would fake.example.com show up in the AddThis analytics? I'm really confused as to what's happening.

There is no sign of my website being hacked though and why would other domains use my AddThis code on their own website? Could this be some kind of DNS hacking that's going on? How are they able to do this?

Any feedback would be much appreciated. Thanks for reading.

#negative #seo

ONPRE Mariana 7 years ago

Hi Topkat325!

Having a competitor playing dirty would not be weird at all.
However, they using your AddThis code on their pages is stupid.

I had a sudden inspiration.

Picture this situation:
Your competition CEO hires someone to work on their SEO.
Is quite common to hire freelancers based on their five-five star score on UpWork or such platforms. I've seen these self-called experts using sloppy, messiest tactics.

Can we consider that maybe they hired someone to work on their SEO, gave your website as a reference of what they wanted, and this person is so stupid that copied code from your website and pasted into theirs?

I have no idea what your business is, but for sure being a competitor does not automatically makes them ruin people.

As a first approache consider the negative backlinks and the AddThis incident to be separate things.

I would try to contact them, and kindly report that their website is using your AddThis usser.

Run a search on Linkedin, try to reach someone who makes desitions there.

Let me know if you need a hand with it.

Good luck! Keep us posted!

-Mariana
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fastreplies 7 years ago

Oh man, what did you do to piss off someone?

But seriously, remember what people are saying: bad press is better than no one cares
If someone is so stupid to use your site material and use it... LOL, send them our way,
we'll pay them for doing that to us. Let them to boost our visibility and consequentially our
SERP because this is exactly what stupid morons are doing.

Don't stop them, let them doing your job and to promote your site because as long as they
are doing that, people would be curious enough to go to source to find for themselves what
is going one and eventually found the truth.

As to your ups and downs, that's have nothing to do with them but with G's dancing around.

fastreplies
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Topkat325

7 years ago

Thanks for your replies.

Originally Posted by ONPRE Mariana

Hi Topkat325!
Picture this situation:
Your competition CEO hires someone to work on their SEO.
Is quite common to hire freelancers based on their five-five star score on UpWork or such platforms. I've seen these self-called experts using sloppy, messiest tactics.

Can we consider that maybe they hired someone to work on their SEO, gave your website as a reference of what they wanted, and this person is so stupid that copied code from your website and pasted into theirs?

Why would they do that? Most webmasters work offline. I think there is something fishy about them using my AddThis code on their website. I don't think it's good to let them know about it at the moment.

The main competitor that used my addthis code on their website doesn't have great bank links either, they have very few banklinks which are mostly junk and they are not ranked very high.

The person who is attacking me with negative SEO seems to really know what they are doing and seems to have a lot of money to throw at people to do their dirty work. Maybe my competitor was hacked? But then why would the hacker run my code on someone else's website? To try to make us fight? I really have no idea.

What is really confusing me is why sub-domains that don't exist on my website are showing up on my addthis analytics. That's really got me confused. How are they doing it?? Any ideas? Is it with some kind of DNS hack? Proxy hack? The server seems clean and when I try to visit the subdomain myself it shows my web servers default page, not my website, and that's what it should show because the sub-domain doesn't exist. The subdomain looks like this:

Code:

 fake.www.example.com

Originally Posted by fastreplies

But seriously, remember what people are saying: bad press is better than no one cares
If someone is so stupid to use your site material and use it... LOL, send them our way,
we'll pay them for doing that to us. Let them to boost our visibility and consequentially our
SERP because this is exactly what stupid morons are doing.

Don't stop them, let them doing your job and to promote your site because as long as they
are doing that, people would be curious enough to go to source to find for themselves what
is going one and eventually found the truth.

Thing is they are posting it on junk websites that no one reads - they are all spam websites. It's hurting my rankings too. Believe me, you don't want it to happen to you. :-(

Thanks again guys. Any feedback would be great.

Thanks
1 reply

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fastreplies

7 years ago

Originally Posted by Topkat325

Thing is they are posting it on junk websites that no one reads - they are all spam websites.

That's where you're wrong.
Junk sites have place and that is why they are exist. They are not created for human
consumption but for crawlers to provide all sorts of SEO support and fake information.

Originally Posted by Topkat325

It's hurting my rankings too.

No, it's not.
In your face, highly sophisticate SEO does, created and operated from within sewer doesn't

Originally Posted by Topkat325

Believe me, you don't want it to happen to you..

But it did and for few months AMRAY Web Directory was booming to the point it placed
AMRAY in top 500 Alexa's ranking. Would you like to do whatever they're doing to you to us?

fastreplies

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Topkat325

7 years ago

Thanks for the replies everyone.

Originally Posted by affmarketer101

If you can find bad links, bad activities with your SEO, you can inform that to Google, it will help you recover the position.

How can I file a report to Google about negative SEO?

Originally Posted by fastreplies

That's where you're wrong.
Junk sites have place and that is why they are exist. They are not created for human
consumption but for crawlers to provide all sorts of SEO support and fake information.

Would you like to do whatever they're doing to you to us?

You would not mind someone spamming your site with anchor text like viagra, porn, etc? When you were spammed with junk links, did you add them to the disavow file?

Thanks
1 reply

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fastreplies 7 years ago

Originally Posted by Topkat325

You would not mind someone spamming your site with anchor text like viagra, porn, etc?

Nope, care less and why should I?
Yes if you have a dozen or so "bad links" you can TRY to take some actions but...
let me ask you. What would you do if you have 20,000 - 30,000 backlinks? Are you
going to spend rest of your life fighting windmills or let them to die... sooner or later?

Originally Posted by Topkat325

When you were spammed with junk links, did you add them to the disavow file?

First of all "disavow" is as useless as last year snow,
second, read above.

fastreplies
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- Eric Sims 7 years ago
  
  Was not aware that disavowing links was useless now. Care to elaborate?
  
  Thanks
  
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simplio 7 years ago

Actually, negative SEO is a big problem facing the companies these days and this is seriously a problem which is coming from Black Hat SEO which is practiced illegally by some companies through the top-ranked company to become top in the list.
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affmarketer101

7 years ago

If you can find bad links, bad activities with your SEO, you can inform that to Google, it will help you recover the position.

Thanks
1 reply

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fastreplies

7 years ago

Originally Posted by affmarketer101

you can inform that to Google, it will help you recover the position.

I can promise you nothing will happen.
Just imagine thousand upon thousands complain requests...

What are you going to do?

Are you going to redirect people who are doing their jobs to deal
with something not in any way effects your business performance?
or
Are you going to hire additional staff and pay for something that is
outside of your business financial interests and necessities?

Of course not, why would you?
Well, so is Google.

fastreplies

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Sufyan47 7 years ago

Hi,

A negative SEO definition can be difficult to come by, as the topic is scarcely discussed, and it's also somewhat broad. However, we'll attempt to make it as clear as possible. Negative SEO is any malicious attempt taken against your site in an attempt to harm your rankings.

Negative search engine optimization isn't necessarily the result of your competitors trying to outrank you. Although most people assume that negative SEO happens when a competitor attacks you, it can also be the result of an individual with a vendetta and significant SEO resources at their disposal.
Thanks for this post!
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simitch 7 years ago

The ways are to protect simple:

Disavow the links or
Build some high quality links quickly
Inform the Google about the abnormal activity

so best option do first one along building quality links. Thanks
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Mitch.J
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- fastreplies 7 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by simitch
  
  Disavow the links or
  Build some high quality links quickly
  Inform the Google about the abnormal activitys
  
  Really? Let me see.
  Google staff is sitting on edge of their chairs waiting for millions of "SEO Pros"
  would complaining about bad backlinks so staff can put their typewriter to work
  on removing some shit it will take next 10 years for them to remove.
  
  Be serious people.
  No one cares who has been linking to you but "SEO Pros" who think only good
  backlinks will help sites to get on top is nothing but bullshit. Google doesn't care.
  
  fastreplies
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  Eric Sims 7 years ago
  
  Nobody is naive enough to think that any of this is done manually.. Machine learning comes into play when determining spammy vs relevant content . I think you may be severely underestimating the sophistication of Rank Brain here.
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  fastreplies 7 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Eric Sims
  
  Nobody is naive enough to think that any of this is done manually.. Machine learning comes into play when determining spammy vs relevant content
  
  Wrong, there is no way some things can be done by "machines" like for example
  penalize spammers or recognize created for SEO scheme spam sites or rearrange
  SERP by manually move selected sites to the top etc. for that you need real people.
  
  Originally Posted by Eric Sims
  
  I think you may be severely underestimating the sophistication of Rank Brain here.
  
  ?Rank Brain? Whatever does it mean, as long its making you happy
  
  fastreplies
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  Eric Sims 7 years ago
  
  Googles machine learning algorithm/rankbrain absolutely can determine and penalize spammy content by taking into account user signals. Sure there still are manual actions but your site can still suffer without manual actions..
  
  Maybe you should read up on it.
  
  https://moz.com/learn/seo/google-rankbrain
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  fastreplies 7 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Eric Sims
  
  Maybe you should read up on it.
  
  Really? Reading Moz? To learn about what?
  
  Let me guess... something I've preached and then forgot 20 years ago.
  before SEO and Google itself? You read Moz if you're not smart enough
  to come up with "stuff" they are making up while go with the flow.
  
  fastreplies
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  Eric Sims 7 years ago
  
  You are the one that didn't even know what Rank Brain was. Give me a break. You claim to be some kind of expert? Disavow files are not read by humans, they are read by machines. This has been confirmed multiple times.
  
  Telling people to not bother with disavowing bad backlinks and not to worry about spammy content linking to their website is just awful advice. Period.
  
  Thanks
  
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mrdeflation 7 years ago

We've been ranking #1-4 for a host of keywords for over 10 years now.

Our business was 50% organic traffic from these keywords

Some competitor just spammed our site with 50,000 viagra/porn links and we are now on the bottom of page 1 - 2 for the same keywords we've ranked on top for 10 years now

Good luck manually reporting 50k backlinks

No freakin' clue what we can do from here but 100% negative SEO works as we just lost 50% of a business because of it
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HerbertMendez 7 years ago

Basicaly native SEO is one of the most irritating issue in this filed. Black Hat SEO is one of the reason for native SEO.
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