How to combat negative SEO ?

[ok180]

My site was hit hard by the penguin update in April, i decided the site was going to be hard to recover in a reasnoble amount of time so i went to a new domain. 3 months later i have recovered most of whats lost, got back to number 1 for my 30k a month exact match term. been doing a lot of white hat backlinking and it has been working well for me.

anyway, last Friday i noticed my link count was starting to shoot up a lot in ahrefs. i had about 900 links and as of today its now over 3800! all the new links are of really low quality blog spam comments and they are all of my main keyword anchor. prior to this my main keyword was 4th behind variations of the url and my brand in terms of anchor count. now it accounts for 95% of the links.

obviously someone is trying to sink my site, is there amything i can do about this? How long do you think I have before the sites drops like a stone?

This is really depressing as the site is for my real bricks and mortar business. We're coming into the busiest period of the year now and I really don't need this shit. Since penguin I have been using Adwords a lot more, now spending about $100 a day and I have also been getting into some other different types of marketing but organic SEO is still the main driver of sales for us. :-/

 

[ThopHayt]

Disavow the links maybe?

 

[ok180]

Do you know something new I don't? Lol

 

[ok180]

Here comes the drop, just went from #1 to #2

 

[CandyLand]

Google hasn't implemented the tool to disavow links yet. I actually am not convinced that google's tool is going to be so simple either. I don't think they will make it as easy as building all kinds of crap to your site, then disavowing whatever doesn't work. I still think there will be penalties. It's still Matt Cunts we're talking about.

But to OP, at least you haven't been penalized yet. You can try reporting it to google, and build some more solid links to your site. However, to drown out that many, it will have to be quite a lot...this isn't what you want to hear, but competitor attacks do work.

 

[Lalalaenhund]

Only thing I can think of is to blast your own site too, but use 1000's of anchors, and targer low obl pages. That would be an aggressive approach, but it may just work, at least your site probably wouldn't completely disappear from the SERPs.

That, or you could just wait and watch your site sink, because if the guy who's blasting you knows what he's doing, you're most likely going down.

In the meantime, I would suggest you focus your efforts and use your skills to rank other websites and diversify your income streams, so things like this wouldn't hurt so much.

 

[ok180]

In the meantime, I would suggest you focus your efforts and use your skills to rank other websites and diversify your income streams, so things like this wouldn't hurt so much.

Yeah, im already doing this. It's hard though when you have a real bricks and mortar business bucause lets face it, if you want converting customers you have to give them a good experience and it's hard to do that with more than one site at a time. Our website cost quite a bit to develop, it's not just some Magento template with stock product images on it. I've poured many many hours into this thing and to see it getting "vandalised" like this is very disheartening.

 

[ija61]

As a user of this technique to rank site... I mean direct blasting to websites with huge number of backlinks I will suggest to start doing their game.

I mean get SB or some service around here and build more high quality links than they do...

And try to keep a constant velocity and use anchor variation or better said anchor diversity....

I can guarantee that a website can be rank in first page using only SB blast... now the game is to take their action to work for you

Get the anchor of those backlinks see what kw they target, get some secondary related kw and build double then they do.

Try to maintain a balance between what they do and your actions... What I mean is to use their number of backlinks to work for you. The idea is that if G see many backlinks build constant it will give you some positive score for that even if they are crap backlinks... so try to maintain the numbers constant and add quality with the backlinks build by you.

What I can tell you is that they do not know what they doing and do not have the appropriate tools or list. Building 4000 links in almost 2 week is nothing, with the appropriate technique you can reach 10k-15k easy....

It is possible that this strategy can make your website dance a little but if you do it write you can get out even stronger...

I must say that I do not test this things, I mean the negative seo part, but I test this method as part of seo campaign and with good result.

So build many backlinks to keep a constant velocity so you can take advantage of the neg seo backlinks, use anchor diversity to fight against the "over optimization" for your main kw and make thing look natural. And add quality to reinforce your position.

In any case just to be sure, register a second domain with a name as close as possible to this, maybe use "-" between words or something like this. Prepare it to take the place of of the current one and if something happen make a redirect or better said a cloaking so G will not see this.

And one more thing.. If you start to drop big time do not stop building backlinks, I can suggest to get even more aggressive (quantity and quality but the quantity is more important) and after a period you will see it rising again.

 

[ok180]

Hi ija61,

At the moment Ahrefs is showing my main keyword with 2667 links, prior to the blast this keyword was showing 65.

My next biggest anchor is <a>noTxst<a> with 320 and then 2x versions of my URL with 255 and 82 links each. Would you suggest that I build at least 3-4k links each to those keywords with SB to bring things back to normal?

 

[assphuck]

Disavow the links maybe?

The problem with disavowing links, should Google release such an option, is that webmasters will be spending all day in disavow mode. This is ok with large corporations because they have an internal staff to handle that. The mom and pop sites out there are basically screwed.

 

[ija61]

Hi ija61,

At the moment Ahrefs is showing my main keyword with 2667 links, prior to the blast this keyword was showing 65.

My next biggest anchor is <a>noTxst<a> with 320 and then 2x versions of my URL with 255 and 82 links each. Would you suggest that I build at least 3-4k links each to those keywords with SB to bring things back to normal?

Sorry mate but I do not understand how is the distribution of the anchor text in baklinks.

So "noTxst" is your main kw and have 320 backlinks? or what?!

Please be more specific so I can try to give you an advice...

But for what are you telling here I do not thing you are a victim of negative seo...

Maybe you order some seo packages that when wrong or things like this... Do you have any other signal of that negative seo attack?

Thank you

 

[linkchamp]

If you want to make sure your site does not receives the penguin penalty you can try to reduce the over all anchor text ratio.

Suppose your anchor text is "green apple" and the competitor is building links with this particular anchor text, then you can increase the non money keyword anchor text ( your domain dot tld, naked urls, click here, website, more info, http:// your domain dot tld ) with the double speed.

Use your brand name and non money keywords as much as you can. Its really tough but you have to do it to survive the next penguin update. Try to make backlinks for the inner pages as well with non money keywords anchor text.

Its really a big issue with competitors firing up our domain, but we don't have any alternate and to survive the ground we have to build quality links faster then our competitors builds spammy backlinks for us.

Best of luck and hope to See you retain your positions.

Cheers, LinkChamp

 

[Camouf]

@ Linkchamp What is the ratio you are aiming for, 10% exact, x% naked urls etc.?

 

[linkchamp]

A Good Link profile ratio for me is

50% Brand Name, 30% to 35% money keywords, 15% to 20% others

50% Brand Name

This is the most important thing as of now. I have really checked many business listings and they rank really well mainly because of their brand name.

your domain
yourdomain
yourdomain dot com
www yourdomain dot com
http:// yourdomain dot com
website yourdomain dot com
visit yourdomain dot com
click here yourdomain dot com


30% Money keywords

( Make sure you don't have exact domain name) Make sure you vary your money keyword anchor text as well. For instance your keyword is "green apple". Don't create backlinks only with this anchor text make it more natural have something like this.
"quality green apple", "your domain green apple" , "I like green apple brand name", "Website green apple 2012"

Try to make as much as anchor text variation even in money keywords.


15% to 20% others

This comes in where i build really links which are really some synonyms of my keywords. But i make sure they are not searched more. Like max 1k exact match per month.
Why i think so is because google even considers synonms for keyword filtering. The more variation the better.

Here the main targets would be :

Click here
find more
checkout site
web site
website
Related site
Know more
VIsit link
Visit website
Synonms of money keywords
Visit site now etc.

Its my personal opinion as we all know no one is certain but i have really put of the shit to find what best works.

Cheers,
LinkChamp

 

[directaxcess]

It's sad to see that people are using negative SEO to screw people over and Google has made it so easy for it to be done -- how can Google be so naive and stupid? Honestly, there isn't really anyway to combat negative SEO except build backlinks to your brand name mostly -- blast out a lot of forum profiles etc with your BRAND instead of keywords. That's your only chance; or watch your site sink in the rankings.

 

[gorang]

I think ija61 has a good plan for you to follow.

But to be honest, Google is the problem here. Not the guy spamming you. So if this is the future of SEO then why not bomb other results in your niche? It is shittyand nasty but so is Google's search updates and policy. You would simply be levelling the playing field in your niche.

I'm just playing devil's advocate here guys, don't hate on me!

 

[nambu]

The problem with disavowing links, should Google release such an option, is that webmasters will be spending all day in disavow mode. This is ok with large corporations because they have an internal staff to handle that. The mom and pop sites out there are basically screwed.

Very true. Unfortunately, Google doesn't care about screwing over mom and pop sites.

 

[ija61]

So if this is the future of SEO then why not bomb other results in your niche?

My answer to your question will be:

1) Because you will never get any result in using this technique against big, old, authority websites. Or you could but the time, money and effort invested in this are so big that may not get you any proffit

2) Because this will not help your website rank higher and will not get any benefit from it if you are not on the next in line, and if you are you will not remain there forever and I found it very difficult to work on both, doing seo for your website and negative seo for the competition.

3) Because this kind of attacks on website that use blackhat technique will not work, or even worst it can bring some more value. As I said this technique can also be used as seo strategy with good results. I do not remember where but I saw a user here that in a discussion about negative seo start to ask if there is anybody that would like to blast his website with xxxx... numbers of backlinks.

 

[nambu]

Disavow the links maybe?

There is some good advice in this thread, but the best advice for what to do in such a situation comes straight from Google itself:

support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34449

(Sorry for the broken link. Haven't been a BHW member long enough since 2009 to post them )

Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you're concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don't control the content of these pages.

Problem solved. You only need to contact all of the 2,667 websites linking to you, and kindly ask them to remove your link. You can't make this shit up folks.

Joking aside, I really feel for you. I know how hard it is to put your blood, sweat, and tears into a site only to have it get knocked down. Looks like you've only moved one spot so far, so best of luck that this doesn't happen.

 

[gorang]

It annoys me so much. We might use blackhat techniques but for the most part we create affiliate or information sites which give users EXACTLY what they're looking for. We don't dupe them, we simply provide for their needs. Mom and Pops brands do the same. Instead, these specifically targeted sites whichd eliver to the user are being penalised by Google in favour of big brands.

It is the same situation as in real life when Wal-mart, Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's started destroying local Mom and Pop's grocery stores by building superstores.

It really fucks me off, pardon my language.