Are Neg SEO Really that effective?

Recently noticed a 100k backlinks pointing to my root domain. Increased my spam score dramatically from 5% to 12%.

Now, lost 30% traffic this month but I don't know if its from the Neg SEO or from the recent Google Core Update.

This website is running 3+ years and have never been affected by any core updates. Until this October update or so I say. The links are mostly from hacked sites. Hacked because they are from legitimate domains.

Is there any way to tell if I got affected by the core update or the negative SEO? One thing, I'd like to experiment is to blast my top 10 competitors with 1 million link blast as well and I see how it goes.

Though I can simply disavow those links but the damage has been done. And I am not sure how my website got affected with it or its just the google update.

I dont think so. I have tried to send 100k+ backlinks to my competitor and it wont works haha
and i am sure that they don't do any SEO

I read somewhere recently, probably here, that they are getting more effective at automatically detecting and ignoring intentional bad links like that.

online28 said:

I dont think so. I have tried to send 100k+ backlinks to my competitor and it wont works haha
and i am sure that they don't do any SEO

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there have been sites affected by negative SEO, someone on the forum even got affected by this a few weeks ago, he came here and said that his site got bombarded with shitty links and he lost the rankings. So it does work

But I think it's more of an authority issue, if your domain has low authority there are bigger chances of being affected than if you had a strong domain with high REAL (not inflated by redirects and other weird-ass methods) DA / DR and lots of indexed pages and ranking for 1000s or millions of keywords. But that's just an assumption of mine, I can't prove it but the point is that negative SEO is a thing unfortunately...

I remember Google once said ignore spam backlinks as there's no effect but at the same time come out with updates to target websites with spammy links.

Head over to GSA and scrapbox threads and many would tell you stories of killing your website by spamming many backlinks.

Google will automatically ignore it and it should revert back. Negative seo is a cowardly act and it should be avoided

Don't do it, doesn't work

Did you try to match the time frame of the update with the traffic loss? (Starting point of the roll out till it finished)
Maybe that gives more clarity to what could be the cause of it, without spending hours on research.

When you intend to continue you grow the website, then you should disavow the links.

And maybe think of a way how you can protect yourself form such attacks.

tazarbm said:

But I think it's more of an authority issue, if your domain has low authority there are bigger chances of being affected than if you had a strong domain with high REAL (not inflated by redirects and other weird-ass methods) DA / DR and lots of indexed pages and ranking for 1000s or millions of keywords. But that's just an assumption of mine, I can't prove it but the point is that negative SEO is a thing unfortunately...

Click to expand...

I agree with him here and assume building more links could protect you from such attacks in the future.

Negative SEO is real and disavow the links if you feel it's spammy