Protecting Yourself from Negative SEO

26 replies
  • SEO
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As the topic states, what can you do to protect yourself from negative SEO. Once someone begins an attack, what can you do? Do you start gathering them up for disavow, do nothing or some other alternative?

I am assuming if your using if you are having someone do SEO on your site, it probably would not be in your best interest to use disavow as a solution since your site will come up on the radar as well.

Hopefully we can get some authorities like Yukon or MikeF to chime in.
#negative #protecting #seo
  • Profile picture of the author cbpayne
    The only negative SEO attacks that I have seen that seem to work have been on sites that already have crap backlink profiles or already had other poor quality signals. Those with good natural editorially given backlink profiles appear to survive ...
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  • Profile picture of the author GyuMan82
    There's nothing you can really do when it comes to negative SEO.

    You can try to use the Disavow Tool but that's just a placebo anyway to make you feel good.

    Best thing you can do is try to get more high quality links and try to hang on.
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  • Profile picture of the author Kevin Maguire
    You can probably avoid it so long as you never rank for anything competitive.
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    • Profile picture of the author chris_87
      Originally Posted by Kevin Maguire View Post

      You can probably avoid it so long as you never rank for anything competitive.
      Right, but I am curious in the more competitive niches, what can you do once you become the target of such an attack?
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      • Profile picture of the author Kevin Maguire
        Originally Posted by chris_87 View Post

        Right, but I am curious in the more competitive niches, what can you do once you become the target of such an attack?
        You can watch the screen using an F5 auto refresh script and watch the spam roll in like a movie. Or you can just get on with things like making dinner.
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        • Profile picture of the author chris_87
          Originally Posted by Kevin Maguire View Post

          You can watch the screen using an F5 auto refresh script and watch the spam roll in like a movie. Or you can just get on with things like making dinner.
          I take it negative SEO doesn't really have too much of an impact if you have quality backlinks and a good site then?
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        • Profile picture of the author danparks
          Originally Posted by Kevin Maguire View Post

          You can watch the screen using an F5 auto refresh script and watch the spam roll in like a movie. Or you can just get on with things like making dinner.
          That's pretty much about it. The only way you know if you're getting hit is when you see the thousands of blog comments with bad anchor text ("viagra," "porn," etc). By the time you see those comments, they're already there and it's a done deal. Someone might blast tens of thousands of such comments in a day or two. So, at that point, you can't "stop" it as it's done. Had this happen on a few sites. And a few times it worked - rankings tanked. First page rankings for fairly competitive keywords. Sites had a pretty good existing backlink profile before the negative SEO. So, contrary to what some people say, negative SEO can work. People who say it won't work probably never had it happen to them. Or they assume if it works then the site already had a bad backlink profile.
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          • Profile picture of the author chris_87
            Originally Posted by danparks View Post

            Had this happen on a few sites. And a few times it worked - rankings tanked.
            Yikes, were you able to ever recover from it, if so what did you do if you dont mind discussing it.
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            • Profile picture of the author danparks
              Originally Posted by chris_87 View Post

              Yikes, were you able to ever recover from it, if so what did you do if you dont mind discussing it.
              One site recovered after a couple of months without disavow (just time passing). The other sites never recovered. Didn't try disavow as the site owners didn't want to bother (one site alone had over 100,000 spam comment backlinks blasted at it in a couple day period). Site owners started over on new domains.
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              • Profile picture of the author chris_87
                Originally Posted by danparks View Post

                One site recovered after a couple of months without disavow (just time passing). The other sites never recovered. Didn't try disavow as the site owners didn't want to bother (one site alone had over 100,000 spam comment backlinks blasted at it in a couple day period). Site owners started over on new domains.
                Tough situation, glad you were able to recover one site at least. I wonder if they will ever address this issue with an algorithm update in the future.
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                • Profile picture of the author danparks
                  Originally Posted by chris_87 View Post

                  Tough situation, glad you were able to recover one site at least. I wonder if they will ever address this issue with an algorithm update in the future.
                  I would imagine they have addressed it, or else it would work every time and the SERPs would be a mess. I visited some of the pages that held the negative blog posts, and it was obvious that there were all sorts of negative SEO attempts (hundreds of comments with bad anchor text targeting all sorts of niches (house painters in Florida, plumbers in another area, etc). So, it doesn't always work. But obviously (to me), Google needs to refine the algorithm because yes, it does work sometimes.
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  • Profile picture of the author Kevin Maguire
    Only thing you can do this prepare for the worst. The current situation favors the current establishment of dominant websites very well. They would be impregnable in most cases to any kind of reasonable attack. Although I doubt the theory has "really" been tested.

    I remember case studies back in the day (4 Years Ago ) with Xrumer, where there was a case study showing that a 45 day looped run of XR using nothing but forum profiles did tank a half decent site. And this was done before link penalties where trendy.

    So as this trend grows, and it does seem to be growing. New sites, small sites, local biz sites are all turkeys just waiting to be shot. While all the while, bigger sites get bigger.

    So long as they killing each other..it's all good in da hood.

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    • Profile picture of the author danparks
      Originally Posted by Kevin Maguire View Post

      Only thing you can do this prepare for the worst. The current situation favors the current establishment of dominant websites very well. They would be impregnable in most cases to any kind of reasonable attack.

      So as this trend grows, and it does seem to be growing. New sites, small sites, local biz sites are all turkeys just waiting to be shot. While all the while, bigger sites get bigger.
      Again, I agree with this. I don't think McDonalds, IBM, New York Times have anything to worry about. But newer, very modest sized sites, that's another story. They might have a good backlink profile, but that might only be 50, 100, 500 backlinks. Then tens of thousands of quick bad backlinks overwhelms the profile. To me it seems like it would be a very easy thing to spot (not just by a human, but algorthimically). Aside from the very few times a post naturally goes viral, when does a site (post, page) get tens of thousands of backlinks in a couple of days? I would think that this would be pretty easy to filter out. Google has certainly thought of this, and Google employees aren't dummies, though, so apparently it's not quite as easy to account for in the algorithm as I assumed.
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    • Profile picture of the author danparks
      Originally Posted by Kevin Maguire View Post

      So long as they killing each other..it's all good in da hood.
      Not if you're a site living in that hood and weren't participating in the attack
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  • Profile picture of the author jezter6
    If you're playing in the hood, expect to see hood rats.

    If people would think outside the box a little and stop playing around with mini niche sites made for Adsense or clickbank garbage and start producing real quality content with value that brings in users and encourages them to share your content with others they'd have sites that don't get hurt.

    If you're going to start a site about toenail clippers thinking you're going to corner the market on one little product, expect a dozen other IMers with Scrapebox, GSA, and SENuke to come and pee in your Cheerios.
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    • Profile picture of the author danparks
      Originally Posted by jezter6 View Post

      If you're playing in the hood, expect to see hood rats.

      If people would think outside the box a little and stop playing around with mini niche sites made for Adsense or clickbank garbage and start producing real quality content with value that brings in users and encourages them to share your content with others they'd have sites that don't get hurt.

      If you're going to start a site about toenail clippers thinking you're going to corner the market on one little product, expect a dozen other IMers with Scrapebox, GSA, and SENuke to come and pee in your Cheerios.
      You're correct about what you said regarding those types of sites. However, the sites I was doing SEO for weren't junk sites. No Adsense, no clickbank, no affiliate stuff. They were fairly small sites, but they were each selling legitimate products. They weren't in a bad neighborhood. As you can read from my above post, people attempt negative SEO on all sorts of niches. The house painters was one example. Shouldn't a house painter be able to put up a website advertising their services? Is that wrong? If one other house painter in the local area does negative SEO on the top 20 ranking sites in that niche, hoping to knock down some or many of them, what are those hit businesses supposed to do? Switch business? Somehow build a huge, established authority site on house painting in southern Florida so that they're immune from negative SEO?
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  • Profile picture of the author abbadox
    I can't prove it but I believe negative seo is much more common than most people realize. It is conveniently camouflaged as a seo ranking service. This occurs allot when companies hire so called seo companies to rank their site only to be disappointed with the real results of a lower ranking site ...lol

    The most common forms of negative seo are just improperly done seo, like over optimization of anchor text, xrummer links, etc.
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    • Profile picture of the author danparks
      Originally Posted by abbadox View Post

      I can't prove it but I believe negative seo is much more common than most people realize. It is conveniently camouflaged as a seo ranking service. This occurs allot when companies hire so called seo companies to rank their site only to be disappointed with the real results of a lower ranking site ...lol

      The most common forms of negative seo are just improperly done seo, like over optimization of anchor text, xrummer links, etc.
      Yes to everything you said. No doubt sometimes a business thinks they've hired someone to do "normal" SEO, and the SEO person uses negative SEO without the person's knowledge. Simply as a shortcut to try to rank his client. And, additionally, there are businesses that know exactly what's going on and intentionally hire some guy in Russia to do whatever it takes to rank. No offense to Russians, but it seems like that area is where a lot of these attacks come from (outside the U.S. so they're immune to U.S. laws, impossible to track them down, nothing you could do even if you figured out who did it, etc.).
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  • Profile picture of the author DexterGallagher
    You have 2 options...this is what happened to us, we found our old SEO guy working for a competitor, 1 month before we parted company, he offered to hack my competitors blog and get it delisted from Google, I said no, then he offered me NEG SEO for them - again I said NO.

    He then gave me a report for the months SEO and none of the work he claimed he had done, was there online or pending...so we parted company.

    Then in October 2013 I find that we have links (50%!) to our main page and inner page using the same anchor text on unrelated sites, both sites fell from the SERPS.

    Action we took...

    Had all the negative links removed, started building more quality links as we ALWAYS created unique, high quality content but due to the hire number of crap links by competitors the site is still on page 2. Got it back from no where!!!!

    Forgot to mention that we had our blog hacked too, so it is TOO Coincidental.....that both services he offered me, has happened to my sites!

    --

    On a side note, you have options, either fight back or not, we did by cleaning out the back links and building new ones, this has now put the business around 4 months behind our projected position, you could also get NEG SEO to their site, but why waste your time? Show you are the better person by getting your site back up and in the SERPS - Knowledge is power, remember.

    If they did it again, I know I would not be as understanding...
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  • Profile picture of the author jameskaavin
    If you want to protect your website then only create do follow back links with quality content
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  • Profile picture of the author multiplecloud
    It's very hard to do but Google can handle negative seo well. Disavow tool in webmaster tool also help you in this case.
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  • Profile picture of the author patco
    You can't protect yourself, but you can always use the disavow tool to get rid of bad backlinks!
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    • Profile picture of the author chris_87
      Originally Posted by patco View Post

      You can't protect yourself, but you can always use the disavow tool to get rid of bad backlinks!
      Might as well send a personalized letter to Matt Cutts.
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  • Profile picture of the author 4D
    Use a pyramid. Point your spammy backlinks to your high PR 2.0s and if somehow the 2.0s fall out of favor, you only have a few to reconfigure instead of 10s of thousands of links of which only a few could be the culprit.
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    • Profile picture of the author danparks
      Originally Posted by 4D View Post

      Use a pyramid. Point your spammy backlinks to your high PR 2.0s and if somehow the 2.0s fall out of favor, you only have a few to reconfigure instead of 10s of thousands of links of which only a few could be the culprit.
      The OP is talking about *other* people sending large amounts of spammy backlinks to his site. Not himself creating questionable backlinks.
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  • Profile picture of the author fivercraze
    When you rank on top of google the people who are already ranked on top do negative soe for the new ranked website so it automatically get bad links which is bad for newly ranked website and hence it finally falls down in ranking...
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