How to handle this?

My partner owns a website through which he sells his own product. He ranks for a dozen high volume keyword, and has had a fairly clean backlink profile until a few months ago.

For the last 4 months, someone has begun a negative SEO campaign against his website. This individual continues to place my partner's website on his banned blogs, and particularly makes them site-wide. So at the end of the day he ends up getting hundreds upon hundreds of backlinks from a banned domain all the time.

There was even a website today that he build up, made some posts on illegal pharm, and then placed my partner's site in the sidebar alongside other illegal pharm websites.

In all of these instances, this individual targets a specific keyword. This keyword and a slight variation of it brings in about 90k+ searches monthly, for which my partner is ranked #3 and #6 for.

The funny thing here is that all of these links have actually helped with the ranks. There has been a steady incline in ranking, so that's the funny side of it.

But I know that enviably these links will hurt the website. As of right now, 55% of the anchor links pointing to his domain is one specific keyword. So that in its own self is already looking bad.

I would also like to mention that for my partner's brand term, he is not ranked at all. Which is pretty strange.

I've advised my partner to look to disavow all of these shitty domains because sooner or later Google will lay down the hammer on his own site for being associated with so many banned domains.

Would that be the right decision here, or should we wait for a reaction from Google? I personally wouldn't be surprised to see our rankings fall once we disavow all of those domains considering those domains have helped us with our rankings.

What would you do?

Clean up sooner rather than later. There is a good chance your rankings will fall, but not as much as getting a penalty from Google. You can't rely on getting the penalty lifted quickly if you disavow the links afterwards, so I think the damage will be larger if you wait for the penalty to hit.

I say don't wait for google's reaction.A penalty is a Penalty.If you are sure the links can affect badly in future, then go using the Disavow tool.

Antoine07 said:

Clean up sooner rather than later. There is a good chance your rankings will fall, but not as much as getting a penalty from Google. You can't rely on getting the penalty lifted quickly if you disavow the links afterwards, so I think the damage will be larger if you wait for the penalty to hit.

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kbklash said:

I say don't wait for google's reaction.A penalty is a Penalty.If you are sure the links can affect badly in future, then go using the Disavow tool.

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Thank you for confirming my opinion on the matter. We will begin disavowing the domains.

Google penalty affect your website ranking. Remove the domains using disavow tool

I do not think Negative SEO is going to work any more. That Way any one can harm their competitors. Only Quality, Relevant links that will matter Rest others should be ignored. As no one is going to create Quality backlinks for their competitors. If that was the case many Top Well Known Sites would have been banned long time back