Negative SEO

[Topkat]

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 a 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.http://www.example.com), I get my webserver's default page which is correct because the sub-domain doesn’t exist. So why would fake.http://www.example.com show up in the AddThis analytics?

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? Are they able to do it maybe with a proxy? How are they able to do this? I'm really confused.

Any feedback would be much appreciated. Thanks for reading.

 

[CyberAlien]

Is it multiple competitors that have your AddThis code or just one?

If it's just one, I would definitely assume there's a good chance that they're involved in the negative SEO.

 

[hmike123]

I think the best is to reach out. Best to way to get someone to stop doing what they're doing.

 

[Topkat]

Is it multiple competitors that have your AddThis code or just one?

If it's just one, I would definitely assume there's a good chance that they're involved in the negative SEO.

There's a few domains in the AddThis list, but there is just one main competitor there - thing is that they don't have many links and the links they do have aren't good. They don't appear to be SEO experts and if they did pay someone money, their money would be better spent trying to build up their own website. Maybe their website was hacked and the hacker pasted my code on there to make us fight? But then again the hacker would let me know, and I found out myself, no one told me. I'm so confused, I don't really know what to think.

I think the best is to reach out. Best to way to get someone to stop doing what they're doing.

You are probably right. Before I send any message to them, I'd like to know what you guys think, so I'll give it some time before I email them.

Any idea how they are getting my code onto sub-domain's that doesn't exist? Could it be a DNS hack? Proxy hack? I think they are doing it for a duplicate page penalty. I have canonical tags on my pages, but these people are pulling off all kinds of tricks :-(

 

[blackhatgorilla]

your site will probably never recover from this.. one of my moneysites were also ranked on page #1 pos 5 after somebody bought about 15k of bad backlinks, iframed my content and spammed my site with bots... i dropped at pos 65 and never recovered, tried everything possible for months, new content, new onpage seo opt., new cdn & page speed plans, expensive pbn magazine backlinks, nothing ever helped, my ranking is always pending between 58-63 position for the last 6 months.. good luck bro, i know the struggle