How to combat negative SEO ?

Sceptre said:

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.

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ok180 said:

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.

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Sceptre said:

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.

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michaelshezzer said:

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.

How to block multiple URLs in the .htaccess file

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

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garrido said:

WTF is this technique?

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linkchamp said:

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

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ok180 said:

>>>UPDATE<<<

*My site that was previously #1 for its main keyword is now floating around #8-#10. The dropped happened after the Panda update the other day though so I think the decline was more to do with the update rather than the spam links. Not sure what I have done to deserve the drop by Panda but I will keep investigating.

*My main keyword that only had 65 links before the attack now has 15k!! AWESOME!

*I submited a pre emptive reconsideration request to google showing them evidence I was removing the links. Sent them a speadsheet with over 2500 of the links that I had contacted webmasters about with email address etc. Also sent them screen shots of the large spike in links from ahrefs. Some links have been removed but by and large most are still up.

*Got the response from Google today saying no manual action has been taken against the site. Regardless of the response I think it was a good idea to at least notify them in some way so they have something on record.


Where to from here? Who knows?

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