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Negative SEO - again...

by online only
19 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi folks,

Some people have tried to manipulate my sites in the past with negative seo. I didn't budge much. I also wasn't trying to remove them or submit to disavow tool. Those sites didn't lose rankings, in fact, they are still ranking really well, even today.

This time I've been hit by a negative seo - again :rolleyes:. This is something that is quite common in lucrative niches, I guess. The guy keeps bombing me. I've received more than 20k blog comments, social bookmarks and other similar stuff with exact keywords (both nofollow and dofollow). This time I'm a bit worried.

Should I start removing them and submitting them to disavow tool, or just act the same like before - completely ignore them?

I have a really-really strong backlink profile, DA/PA over 60 and 95% links I have acquired via outreaching and great content.

I've completely white hat link acquisition record, thus I've feeling that Google is smart enough to understand that those links are not built by me. Plus, I'm bit paranoid of using the disavow tool on a site if it doesn't have a known penalty already.

Any thoughts? Especially from people who have experienced neg. seo.

Kudos
#negative #seo
  • Profile picture of the author godoveryou
    Hard to say, but if they only hit you with 20k links then they obviously don't have the infrastructure or capacity to really do link-based Neg SEO effectively.

    When you see 500k-1m new links in a day, then you know you pissed off someone that can really do some damage. In that case, you would need to run and make moves quickly. Seeing 500k-1m links means they built closer to 10-15m in that day links which means it's time to head for the hills because they can probably keep doing it.

    Basically I'm just telling you that it's not a huge attack.
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    • Profile picture of the author online only
      Originally Posted by godoveryou View Post

      Hard to say, but if they only hit you with 20k links then they obviously don't have the infrastructure or capacity to really do link-based Neg SEO effectively.

      When you see 500k-1m new links in a day, then you know you pissed off someone that can really do some damage. In that case, you would need to run and make moves quickly. Seeing 500k-1m links means they built closer to 10-15m in that day links which means it's time to head for the hills because they can probably keep doing it.

      Basically I'm just telling you that it's not a huge attack.
      Thanks for your answer.

      That's the same thing that I thought. The only thing that's worrying me is that he/she is continuing this crap. Probably ordering gigs from fiverr and praying that I'll drop

      500k links per day is going to be different scenario, indeed.
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      • Profile picture of the author patco
        Originally Posted by online only View Post

        Thanks for your answer.

        That's the same thing that I thought. The only thing that's worrying me is that he/she is continuing this crap. Probably ordering gigs from fiverr and praying that I'll drop

        500k links per day is going to be different scenario, indeed.
        500k per day?!? Is it even possible doing so many... I heard a guy made 45k for a negative SEO for one day, but 500k They won't be indexed
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        • Profile picture of the author Kevin Maguire
          Originally Posted by patco View Post

          500k per day?!? Is it even possible doing so many... I heard a guy made 45k for a negative SEO for one day, but 500k They won't be indexed
          I've seen tools like GScraper and Xrumer do 1500 LPM so x 1440 M

          = 2160000

          To get a full 25% of those indexed or 500k per day, you would simply have to run multiple instances across a few servers.

          Even with something very slow like GSA or Senuke, they still both whack out a lot of LPM. And when you don't have to factor in any type of module or tier planning (everything just going to money page) They could both probably take down the average marketers site.

          As soon as people with deep enough pockets to afford to invest in servers with 32G+ Ram. It's going to be game over for anything they shoot at. Because you can then multiply the numbers I mentioned above, to infinity.
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  • Profile picture of the author danparks
    Originally Posted by online only View Post

    I've completely white hat link acquisition record, thus I've feeling that Google is smart enough to understand that those links are not built by me.
    Oh, for that to be true. You'd think so, but it's not the case. Not always, anyway. I've had three client sites hit by negative SEO that worked - they were ranking top 5 for several keywords and the negative SEO sent the keywords to the hundreds positions.

    The backlinks profiles of each site where pretty good. Probably not as good as your site, but not bad, and they never had any spammy SEO done to them.

    The attacks were between 50,000 to 100,000+ spammy blog comment backlinks over a day or two.

    The drop in rankings occurred within about a week or so of the attacks.

    I can't say what works or not regarding repairing. The site owners chose to wait it out a month or so, there was no bounce back, and they simply started over on new domains. I'm not saying that's the best thing to do, just saying that's what these people did.

    Those attacks were the usual negative SEO with all anchor text being of the "porn", "cheap viagra" variety. One somewhat interesting note. There was one other site I'm doing SEO on and it got attacked with 100,000+ blog comments backlinks that all had anchor text of one of the keywords the site was ranking #2 for. So, this time I guess the person was trying for an over-optimization penalty - too many backlinks with an exact keyword anchor. That fortunately didn't work. The site dropped several places for a week, then rebounded back to #2.

    I highlighted the part of your post that said "I've feeling that Google is smart enough to understand that those links are not built by me" because that's how I felt. This huge burst of spammy backlinks is so obviously not done by the site owner, it seems like a simple thing for Google to catch and ignore. With the (I assume) huge complexity of Google's algorithms, it seems like catching negative SEO would be a successful part of it. But it's not. At least not consistently (I'm sure there are probably a huge number of SEO attacks everyday that don't work).

    Anyway, you should know within fairly short order if the attack worked or not (if it worked it won't be too long before some or all of your ranking keywords drop).
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  • Profile picture of the author GyuMan82
    You should at least try to disavow them.

    I don't think that will really help honestly, but it will at least make you feel like you did what you could.
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    • Profile picture of the author online only
      Originally Posted by GyuMan82 View Post

      You should at least try to disavow them.

      I don't think that will really help honestly, but it will at least make you feel like you did what you could.
      I guess I'll do that. For the first time ever. Never thought that I would need to use this tool.
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    • Profile picture of the author DexterGallagher
      It does not help and it does not make you feel better...I know from experience.

      I have been told personally to start a fresh with a brand new domain, could you not redirect the link juice to the new site with redirects in cpanel?? Just a thought....

      Originally Posted by GyuMan82 View Post

      You should at least try to disavow them.

      I don't think that will really help honestly, but it will at least make you feel like you did what you could.
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  • Profile picture of the author seamy82
    Surely this needs to be addressed by Google. This means for a couple of hundred bucks spent on fiverr gigs, I could completely blow all my competitors out of the water. Where would it stop? I'm sure you're tempted to act in kind back to other websites in your niche. It's scummy as hell. What's the disavow tool for then, if it doesn't help with stuff like this. Surely there should be a two or 3 week window in which someone has the opportunity remove such links via this tool, before factoring them in the ranking of your site.
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    • Profile picture of the author Kevin Maguire
      Originally Posted by seamy82 View Post

      Surely this needs to be addressed by Google. This means for a couple of hundred bucks spent on fiverr gigs, I could completely blow all my competitors out of the water. Where would it stop? I'm sure you're tempted to act in kind back to other websites in your niche. It's scummy as hell. What's the disavow tool for then, if it doesn't help with stuff like this. Surely there should be a two or 3 week window in which someone has the opportunity remove such links via this tool, before factoring them in the ranking of your site.
      One might think, that the introduction of links being able to hurt a site was done on purpose by Google.

      In any change you have to ask the simple question.

      Cui bono? (Who benefits?)

      The existing internet giants do, with unbreakable link profiles.

      Why would they do that to benefit only those domains?

      Because they create most of the traffic, and above all profits.

      Who gets hurt?

      The small guys who get a little traffic, have small link profile, and don't create much profit for G. The link spammers, the IM'ers, the small niche site owners.

      Whats the end result?

      The big sites get bigger, the small sites get smaller. And everyone who want's to be on page 1 for a result for more then a month. Needs to start using paid advertising (Adwords)

      Google has just giving everyone Guns.

      Neg SEO (M240 Machine Gun)
      Report Paid Links (M60 Machine Gun)
      Report Shitty Sites (PPSH-41 Sub-Machine Gun)
      Disavow Links (M40 Rifle)

      Now they're just going to sit back and watch every small site kill each other.

      Who needs a Google Webspam team, when we have each other to do the work for them?


      Online Only

      I have a 10k+ fairly strong link profile. It took the hit of about 2k trackbacks and comments. Rattled around a small bit for about a week. But seems to be getting back to normal now. I will hold off for a while, until I'm sure all the spam is found, before disavowing starts.

      I also bought a domain a few weeks ago, that still getting spam found 100+ a day, 2 years after the domain was dropped. So it does depend on how heavy the site was hit. Maybe next year I will disavow every link ever created, and start a fresh with it. Domain name was too good to pass up. Probably worth $25k+ just for the name so, it will be worth the time and effort of cleaning.
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  • Profile picture of the author Klemen Znidar
    Can you afford to not do anything ? Would make a great case study
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  • Profile picture of the author jinx1221
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  • Profile picture of the author Moneymaker2012
    Negative seo is harmful for your site, you might be lucky once that it didn't affect your site at all, but you won't be luck always may be you need to take a risk here and then see what happens and be prepared to handle if any problem occurs.
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    • Profile picture of the author Kevin Maguire
      Originally Posted by Moneymaker2012 View Post

      Negative seo is harmful for your site, you might be lucky once that it didn't affect your site at all, but you won't be luck always may be you need to take a risk here and then see what happens and be prepared to handle if any problem occurs.
      Yes I'm prepared. "be prepared to handle if any problem occurs"

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      • Profile picture of the author nik0
        Banned
        I used to do neg SEO on one of my own sites, just to test the theory.

        First blast of 100k or so comments only made the rankings bounce a bit for a week or so.

        The second blast completely tanked the site, not ranking anywhere for the domain name either btw.

        The site had hardly any legit back links btw.

        By the time I removed the site (only blasted inner pages) the homepage started to rank again for the domain name so was interesting to see how it could recover without a Penguin refresh or disavow (heck penguin and disavow perhaps didn't even exist back then).
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  • Profile picture of the author netanel23
    Simple answer, if you are serious about your site than start removing links. Don't count on the disavow doing much for this type of negative SEO.

    Start building a new site or removing links at this point. A new site will likely suffer the same fate though once it starts ranking.

    Good luck, you are gonna need it.
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    • Profile picture of the author danparks
      Originally Posted by netanel23 View Post

      Simple answer, if you are serious about your site than start removing links. Don't count on the disavow doing much for this type of negative SEO.

      Start building a new site or removing links at this point. A new site will likely suffer the same fate though once it starts ranking.

      Good luck, you are gonna need it.
      And there's the rub. You could go through the work of trying to remove bad links, disavowing tens of thousands of bad links, waiting many weeks for Google to respond to the disavow request, waiting longer for the inevitable time it takes to rebound and then ... the same person who blasted you with the initial negative SEO simply runs another negative SEO campaign against you! It's work to try to recover. It's virtually no work to spam a website (or dozens of ranking websites in the niche you're trying to rank in).
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  • Profile picture of the author Chad Kimball
    has your ranking dropped at all?
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    • Profile picture of the author online only
      Originally Posted by Chad Kimball View Post

      has your ranking dropped at all?
      No. I disavowed and moved on. If I get some sort of "manual penalty" or my site gets penguined - then, I might start removing them and documenting it all the way.

      But currently it's OK. My competitor got those spammy links as well, he/she is still ranking.
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