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Someone attacked our site with negative seo!
Posted by on January 30, 2021 at 11:45 amWe discovered someone attacked our website with Negative SEO sending out thousands of blog comment spam using our website URL and keyword.
This happened without our permission.
Quick questions
– Will this effect our google organic traffic?
– Is it possible to cleanup or disavow these bad links. -
18 Replies
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It might hurt your site. Are the links going to the homepage or other core pages? Are all the links coming from the same source URL? Disavow doesn’t do anything these days. Quite frankly, it never did and only helped Google by SEOs building their spam index. What you need to do is 404 or 410 those bad links. If it’s to core pages, you will have to build a system to check for source URLs. But, before you do anything, first make sure the attack even affected your sites traffic in GA.
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Most likely not. Google for the most part ignores these comments links. You can use the disavow tool if you feel like they are harming your results.
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You can disavow but your best plan of attack is to get some clean-high authority and topical relevant backlinks going-even if you have to use paid directory sites. Just remember not to add them all at once or you’ll end up in the sandbox (which is really just adding insult to injury at this point). People can be such asshats. Best of luck and it’ll work out.
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A blast of spam links will not hurt you. Google ignores those.
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this is what disavow tool is for
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To be honest, no one knows. Some say it hurt, some say it doesn’t hurt. I won’t worry about it too much but just remove them in case.
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Negative SEO is a thing of the past. Google doesn’t fall for it these days.
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Just check that you don’t have a manual action. If you don’t, you can safely ignore their efforts.
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Did it hit your rankings? Disavow is the last resort (signals something that your intention is high ranking (logic but susshhh)
Go to ahrefs or majestic and look to the balance between healthy and toxic. Google understands you always have some bad links. If that is in your disadvantage than and only than disavow. Better to create healthy links, but everybody knows how hard it is
Search for Google Bowling
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Disavow tool. It’s an easy listing of these fraudulent domains / URLs. It happened to one of my websites too. The competitors were buying links from very low and spammy domains probably generated by bots. It was not clear if it was harming us, but in any case, just to be sure, we did it with my team. It’s a pain to keep track of all of them all the time. The best is to have real people talking and linking to you, a good relationship can cancel thousands of useless links. Negative-Seo may be a thing from the past, but the whole online journey is based on reputation, no?
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were your rankings affected? that’s the question…
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Honestly I can’t see that Google would penalize you for something that’s out of your control.
Otherwize why wouldn’t everyone send spam backlinks to their competitors.
I think you’ll be fine…they will just be devalued.
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Google says they ignore those, so it won’t hurt your ranking. That said, I like to just use the disavow tool. I know there’s some back and forth on what that signals in the comments below, but I know that when I disavowed about 200 “toxic” domains pointed to my company’s site (we use SEMRush’s audit tool to determine that) we saw an almost immediate jump in keywords, ranking and traffic.
Admittedly, we were running other SEO efforts, so that might just be coincidence, but still was enough of a jump for me to take notice.
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Have you seen a drop in rankings?
Monitor the site for two to three months. If there is no major drop that can’t be explained by changes made or an algo update, then penguin 4.0 is doing its job and just ignoring these links.
Someone is spending time and effort on something that isn’t gonna work.
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The more I read other such stories, the more I learnt that Google Algorithms have gotten better over the last few years to automatically weed out Negative SEO issues.
I could be wrong but I couldn’t find many recent stories of SEO attacks.
If nothing has changed then you should be fine. But there’s no harm in doing a disavow using Google Search Console.
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