Victim of Negative SEO Porn Backlink Attack

I have run many SEO campaigns over the years, but never have I encountered this, so I was wondering if any of you guys have been victim of a negative SEO backlink attack? Yesterday I was looking at my backlinks on ahrefs and noticed a sharp increase the past few days to the tune of 500 links a day. I then looked at my anchor text cloud and saw that all these links had the following anchors: porn, sex, or viagra.

I immediately freaked out and started to disavow all the links I have found as they show up. Is there anything else I can do? I am pretty sure it is the #2 guy ranking behind me in my niche. I saw that he started doing a massive link building campaign starting in early November, and I wonder if he is pissed he can't supersede me and decided to try to attack me instead?

Has anyone ever had this happen to them? Did it negatively affect your rankings? Do you think it will affect mine? I am trying to disavow the links as soon as they appear, I just hope I am getting them all. These links have yet to appear in my Google WMT, but I see them on ahrefs and other backlink tracking sites. I am concerned that after penguin, that these links will be considered manual spam and result in a penalty against me I hope Google's algorithm is smart enough to realize that stupid porn links pointing to me have nothing to do with my content and realize I am being attacked.

Thoughts?

Unfortunately disavowing is your only option.

Maybe start selling viagra on your site?

Hopefully Google will recognize that it is negative SEO. I suggest that you create another site in the same niche, so you have two sites in one niche. That will help you secure your profits. If s/he takes position #1, at least you could potentially own position #2 and #3.

I had a car rental website at position 15 that was spammed with viagra, porn and sex links. Funny enough it ranked to the 1st position for 6 months then tanked to nowhere. of-course this is not conclusive, disavow once every week and wait it out.

Google introduced link removing web tool some time ago, you can try it.

Check your sites. Maybe you're infected with malware.

TeKn1qu3z said:

Check your sites. Maybe you're infected with malware.

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I thought that too at first, but I verified I wasn't and the links are just pointing back to my homepage with those anchors. Seems like an XRumer campaign.

WebLab said:

Google introduced link removing web tool some time ago, you can try it.

Click to expand...

That's my current defense.

yorklifter said:

Unfortunately disavowing is your only option.

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Fortunately that isn't true. The disavow is a great waste of your time, it does not help discount links or remove them. The only thing you can do at this point is use a link removal service or remove the links yourself. The nice thing is that I was hit by a negative SEO campaign late last year and took action and got a good majority of the links removed.

This is why: most of the time these links are from spammed to death blogs. That means a few things. Either the webmasters don't know because it's an old domain or they do know but don't know what to do or care. Point is that when removal requests were sent I often had to walk through the site owners on how to delete all comments, or the best way to entirely remove their crappy domain.

For those that didn't respond I reached out to the hosting companies. Most of the time they were happy to disable the blog given the circumstances. I pointed out several occasions in which negative SEO was being used via the blogs. Since these sites were eating up bandwidth and server resources they just disabled the hosting account entirely or the domain specifically until the webmaster fixed the issues.

Relying on your disavow tool will be the worst thing you can do.

WebLab said:

Google introduced link removing web tool some time ago, you can try it.

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What? Im pretty sure you mean disavow. You can't remove the links.

i have been hit by negative seo . yes it will hurt your site. simply disowning them is not enough . try to remove as much as posible.

BassTrackerBoats said:

Maybe start selling viagra on your site?

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Sorry if I struggle to see any humour in your post.

to OP, I was negatively SEO'ed in a smart way as the attacker used the right anchor texts and basically tried to over-optimise my off-page seo. It worked at first but then I recovered.
I would think that google are smart enough to ignore those links but they are not... google are now relying on people reporting spam or websites going offline.

goldendeli said:

]Relying on your disavow tool will be the worst thing you can do.

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I have to disagree with you here. I have revived many sites solely using the disavow tool. It's ten times more practical than contacting webmasters and host to remove links, even if you are using a software program to automate some of the process.

It becomes even more impractical or even worthless when someone is hammering your site with 20K+ links per day.

Sad.
Is there some way/tool, that can redirect google bots when they come from some domain or IP. I mean:
sexblog pointed to your site --> script on your site, that 301 redirect somewhere (404 maybe or aff. offer) when someone click on the link from the sexblog (sexblog list).
I think there have such way/tool/script and also think that google's disavow tool works like that and once the list is submitted the bots stop moveing to your site from this sexblogs and the link have 0 weight.

Disavow is what you need to do checkout the robots file.

You should check if there are new links coming in daily. It sucks but your best bet is to block them all out by disavow.

link remove services much more expensice than backlink services omg

Disavow and contact Google with relentless pursuit and explain to them. Email, call, mail letters. It is an obvious attack and they should fix it if they are working correctly.

Contacting the webmasters of these blogs is a crazy idea. It's not like it is 10-20 blogs... 1500+ links so far from different domains. That would be a full time job in itself for a few people lol. So that is definitely out of the question. Best thing I have found are the backlink services have an easily tool to auto check and export domains/urls from the new backlinks list to a disavow txt file. That's what i've been currently doing, it's just tedious. I wonder how long he will spam me for