How to combat negative SEO ?

[Marcink99]

You cant defend agains negative seo. If somebody wants you down they will get you down.

 

[rliddle]

Google used to make a big deal about not allowing the ability for others to impact your rankings. That seems to have gone by the wayside, unfortunately.

 

[nambu]

Google used to make a big deal about not allowing the ability for others to impact your rankings. That seems to have gone by the wayside, unfortunately.

Yep, they freely admit it now. As I quoted from their site above:

"Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index."

Instead of BS'ing us that it's impossible to harm a competitor's rankings, they now state that they're working "hard" to prevent it from happening. What a pathetic joke Google has become.

 

[WrightWilliams]

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.

1) This is not true. Negative SEO can take down even established sites, depending on the level of the current link health of the site pre-Negative SEO. Also it is incredibly affordable as you are literally doing things 'the wrong way'.

2. Its common sense that if you are in a small competition marketing and you build healthy links for your site while an automated Negative SEO program/bot gets your competitor de-indexed or dropped in rank that you will move up. It isn't difficult to do Negative SEO, as with most negative things its easier than doing it the right way.

3) The point is with Negative SEO you aren't ever spamming it with links that are perceived as being good links, so the chance of a reward instead of a burden is incredibly minimized. Google will not see those 8 million spammy backlinks as good links, because they've already de-indexed sites for using the same spammy backlinks being employed in the Negative SEO campaign.

 

[WrightWilliams]

Yep, they freely admit it now. As I quoted from their site above:

"Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index."

Instead of BS'ing us that it's impossible to harm a competitor's rankings, they now state that they're working "hard" to prevent it from happening. What a pathetic joke Google has become.

I don't see how they are working hard to prevent it, when they start to think any link towards a site could be an unnatural one it's a stretch to say they are protecting you from Negative SEO.

 

[ok180]

Thanks for all the comments guys.

The blog comment spam keeps shooting up every day. They only did one blast by the looks of it on 24/8/12. At the moment Ahrefs is showing over 3k of these links.

If I source some really good quality high PR links help to outweigh the bad stuff? For instance at the moment im trying to get a link from my payment gateway provider that is on PR5 page. It would be an image of my logo with a link to my website. Would that type of thing help outweight a couple thousand of these bad links?

What im hoping to do is fight this stuff with quality rather than quantity.

 

[mickyfu]

This is how I stopped it on one of my sites. I wrote an email to the top 40 sites and told them I knew it was them blasting my site. I told them the minute my site went down I was going to blast the fk out of their website and I also had their details through the whois of their domain. Funny enough the blasting stopped. By the way, I just made up a throw away email as I was obviously going to get 30 odd angry emails back.

 

[ija61]

1) This is not true. Negative SEO can take down even established sites, depending on the level of the current link health of the site pre-Negative SEO. Also it is incredibly affordable as you are literally doing things 'the wrong way'.

2. Its common sense that if you are in a small competition marketing and you build healthy links for your site while an automated Negative SEO program/bot gets your competitor de-indexed or dropped in rank that you will move up. It isn't difficult to do Negative SEO, as with most negative things its easier than doing it the right way.

3) The point is with Negative SEO you aren't ever spamming it with links that are perceived as being good links, so the chance of a reward instead of a burden is incredibly minimized. Google will not see those 8 million spammy backlinks as good links, because they've already de-indexed sites for using the same spammy backlinks being employed in the Negative SEO campaign.

I get good result on building backliks on pages with 10k-15k comments so I do not thing getting backlinks on a de-indexed website can hurt you so much, less if you build another 8 mill on not flaged websites

I don't see how they are working hard to prevent it, when they start to think any link towards a site could be an unnatural one it's a stretch to say they are protecting you from Negative SEO.

I think we have different opinion about how negative seo must be done.. I must recognize that here I have a handicap since I have never tried and never use it...

So please explain how you thing that a negative seo campaign should be done to be effective... Take a example so we can discuss.

Thanks for all the comments guys.

The blog comment spam keeps shooting up every day. They only did one blast by the looks of it on 24/8/12. At the moment Ahrefs is showing over 3k of these links.

If I source some really good quality high PR links help to outweigh the bad stuff? For instance at the moment im trying to get a link from my payment gateway provider that is on PR5 page. It would be an image of my logo with a link to my website. Would that type of thing help outweight a couple thousand of these bad links?

What im hoping to do is fight this stuff with quality rather than quantity.

Here you are wrong.... You must make some research on backhat seo technique....

If he build 3000 links in one day.... the stop for 1 week, blast another 2000 stop for 1 day... blast 5000 in the next day and then nothing for 2 weeks then your PR5 backlink will worth nothing...

You must use quantity and then quality when fight agains this kind of technique....


I want to mentioned that I have no experience in fight against negative seo but from my experience in using spamming technique to rank website I think that the strategy that I have mentioned can work against ....

 

[bertbaby]

Until someone puts together a class action suit and sues Googliath for their half-assed algorithm nothing will change.

 

[Murdoch1337]

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.

Another person who hates it when people are successful. You do realize that all of the shops you mentioned at one point started as small stores.

Also keep in mind, its not Walmart thats using negative SEO... It's the moron competitor (likely another mom and pop shop) that is doing it.

 

[ok180]

Here you are wrong.... You must make some research on backhat seo technique....

If he build 3000 links in one day.... the stop for 1 week, blast another 2000 stop for 1 day... blast 5000 in the next day and then nothing for 2 weeks then your PR5 backlink will worth nothing...

You must use quantity and then quality when fight agains this kind of technique....


I want to mentioned that I have no experience in fight against negative seo but from my experience in using spamming technique to rank website I think that the strategy that I have mentioned can work against ....

Thanks for the tips but I just don't see the logic in bombarding my site with millions of crap links to combat thousands of crap links. Surely that will get the site deindexed in no time? Prior to penguin a competitor of mine was doing this to their own site to rank it and guess what? They have dissapeared from the serps now. My previous site that I had prior to penguin had a lot of spammy links also but was never "blasted" and it's actually starting to come back in the serps now after 4 months.

 

[ok180]

Also keep in mind, its not Walmart thats using negative SEO... It's the moron competitor (likely another mom and pop shop) that is doing it.

Exactly, I have my list of suspects of who might be doing this but it's not one of the big guys. Believe it or not but online sales are only a fraction of big companies turn over, they don't pay that much attention to it let alone go out and try and crunch little guys.

 

[Pilot]

I think what you're running into is the greatest danger of basing your business around SEO--the fact that Google and Google alone can determine your rankings and you're pretty much at the mercy of whatever they decide is the flavor of the day.

I second what a lot of other people are saying--focus on diversifying your income sources to immunize yourself against these kinds of attacks. Going after lower-competition keywords also helps. There's less danger of these kinds of tactics.

 

[assphuck]

Until someone puts together a class action suit and sues Googliath for their half-assed algorithm nothing will change.

I'll donate some money to help further a good class action lawsuit. My beef is recovering lost revenue and dealing with threats related to link removal requests. Google should compensate webmasters for this, especially those that own the websites which are named in failed reconsideration request E-mails.

 

[therage]

I'd compensate by adding quality content, and building more authority links to my site. At one point they will stop, and by then you are either sandboxed or you will have bounced up and back on track. Go search some of the negativity backlinks and see what you can do about it.

 

[jox51]

This is ridiculous. You may be left with the option of registering another domain and building a clone of your site. This way you have a plan b. Other than that, it seems that when this happens to someone, all they can do is leave their pants down.

 

[ok180]

This is ridiculous. You may be left with the option of registering another domain and building a clone of your site.

The site is 3 months old, it's for a bricks and mortar business. It's not really an option for us to change domains every few months.

 

[michaelshezzer]

Im sure there is a way of getting rid of those nasty links... I havent used this method but I have it just in case sh*t hits the fan.. I read that you can block specific spammi URLs linkiing to your site by adjusting your .htaccess file the website ref is here with the code and instructions its pretty much a copy/paste job

botcrawl.cxm/how-to-block-incoming-traffic-backlinks-attempted-site-hijacks-and-multiple-urls-in-the-htaccess-file/

However your going to have to try your hardest to get as many spammed URLS listed into the htaccess file. This could also be your salvation if google slaps you cause then you could block the majority of the spammed links thus making you look good enough for a reconsideration.

[h=3]How to block multiple URLs in the .htaccess file[/h]Blocking multiple URLs in the .htaccess file is a little different than blocking a single URL. [NC,OR] must follow every URL on the conditions list starting with the first one, excluding the last URL on the list.


To block multiple URLs copy and paste the code below into your .htaccess file.

Change only domain\.com (or domain2, etc.) to the domain you wish to block, keep the URL in the exact same format, adding a \ before each extension. (ie: botcrawl\.com or botcrawl\.co\.uk). To add more domains simply follow the previous rule as stated above concerning [NC,OR].


RewriteEngine on
# Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} domain\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} domain2\.net [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} domain3\.co\.uk
RewriteRule .* - [F]
I hope this helps you mate!!
p.s. sorry about the link cant post them yet

 

[jox51]

The site is 3 months old, it's for a bricks and mortar business. It's not really an option for us to change domains every few months.

Unfortunately, if the other guys are performing negative SEO, this may be the best option. You can build a new site and rank it fairly quickly. At worst, dont perform much SEO on the other site. Like keep it on page 2, out of the radar of your competitors but still close for your visitors. This way, you have a solid and quick backup in case Google does their thing.

 

[Joker7]

Just add authority to your site, it's the easiest and only way (for now). You know what a billion spam links would do to wikipedia or edmunds? Nothing.

Social media and press releases is the fastest way to gain authority to your site nowadays, make use of it.