I opened a site in a grey hat niche with slight competition (essentially it's a single competitor).
Getting a lot of spam links from Chinese sites recently right after 3-4 keywords from my site started ranking. Pretty sure it's my competitors doing.
Feeling pretty disheartened. Interested in listening to similar experiences to feel like I am not alone.
Also any suggestions on how to avoid these neg SEO attempts is welcome.
Odds are stacked against new sites sadly, my usual suggestion is to avoid being notice until your site
has enough power to absorb spam. Sadly this is like a filter in some niches, as if you get seen and
anger towards you too quick then to an extent google would think it is your yourself sending these
links trying to game the system. Avoiding them is more or less up to luck, because saying
"dont upset someone by rising in their niche too fast" is too general and almost impossible to practice
Especially when sometimes Negative seo attacks are done with almost no reason, it can be so
cheap to link spam that some people just have done it for fun picking a random site.
That being said, I feel like it is rare to happen but in some niches where darker people
are likely operating, you are 10 x more likely to have it happen.
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Just an example, gonna be vague but was working on a site in what id all an "illegal downloads" niche
Where more or less you do seo to rank for downloads, that you do not even have, so you milk
the people searching for such downloads for promotion / ads. (Im not saying I condone this, but we all had to learn seo somewhere, sometimes working with odd people).
If you tried to rank for a download search and the wrong web master realizes their page aint making money cus you out ranked them.
(neighter of you even have the download to offer, so the bounces can cause rankings to move around unpredictable, but if you are the only option, even though
you dont have GTA 6 or whatever bs you are claiming to have, if you are the only option then you will stay rank 1)
So the more niche a mobile game etc you go after, you can stay longer.
site was going good for 3 months, then one day traffic tanked. When the links finally appeared in gsc it was pure p*rn.
That domain was done for, it wasnt a clean business model to begin with just rinse and repeat.
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Now as for one I consider funny, that happened to a site I used to own.
Wrote a critical articled about a scummy MLM business (Was common knowledge, it wasnt even like some new slander, it was based on fact of events)
......... got an email asking me to take down the article in 5 days. The person never specified who there were in relation to the
borderline Ponzi scheme. I was just gonna take down the article because I figured it wasnt worth the trouble and was already slightly regretting
writing on that topic because I wasnt feeling it.
not even 3 days in, the article dropped out the top 100. I wondered if they mass reported the featured snippet or some other stupidness,
I do a search and hundreds of payday loan backlinks and other spam was pointing to that direct page.
I 301 the whole page to the ***************** home page, while I dont have any proof it was someone
100% associated with the company sent me the email, I dont think it is likely anyone else, and I was mad that
before 3 days were even up they were messing with my site.
You can speculate on what happened next. But they did start sending spam to other pages after so the domain was dead.
For what it is worth, I had the last laugh.
