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So is Negative SEO real or a myth? When they send spammy bad backlinks to your site?
I always see a mixed bag, Google claims its not a real thing, some people who lost ranking believe its real since they check their backlink profiles and seen influxes of bad backlinks
I remember someone telling me this only works if the website is new and have no backlink profile and someone spams you with bad backlinks. But if you have a strong backlink profile where the good outweigh the bad it won’t hurt you.
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1 Reply
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It’s real.
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Yes, its real but generally Google ignore these types of links. Check only if you got manual penalty otherwise not need to worry about it.
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Can anyone link to your site using any anchor text they want? Of course
But the absolute biggest mistake I see is from people who are actively link building and tracking where they are located.
They start noticing links they didn’t build and get suspicious.
Ok, here’s the catch…the links they didn’t build are actually the natural ones and the ones they are building the risky ones.
They then *facepalm* disavow everything they didn’t build themselves.
So, regarding negative SEO
The cases I’m familiar with, both parties know and hate each other, major vendetta. Neither are innocent. Why else would someone go through the trouble?
But to dial it back a second, who really is most at risk?
A legitimate well established business with a normal link profile? No, not really.
The sites most at risk have been manipulating links already (usually too much so) so they are already guilty, but someone comes along with a link spam app and sends them a ton more. Harm? Perhaps, certainly could grab Google’s attention faster.
So, aiming for a natural organic link profile is the best defense. If you’re going to build links, be stealthy about it and please don’t use the same keyword anchor text 1,645 times!
I general, I would say the risk is very low for most sites. If you play in heavily spammy areas such as APKs, essay writing, movie/mp3 downloads, porn, drunk driving attorneys etc. you’re entering realms where you expect dirty play.
Please, don’t use disavow because some stupid tool said the link is toxic or DA0 or any other nonsense.
Summary, low almost non-existent risk for vast majority of sites.
Best defense, don’t due dumb* link building yourself.
* obvious link building = vast majority of links don’t contain nofollow, vast majority of links use exact match keyword anchor text (doesn’t happen in real life), vast majority of links are to interior pages, really low brow “article marketing” using the techniques above.
Spam links are NOT the problem, Google doesn’t care about them. Google cares about link manipulation.
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It is real. And until you see it in action, you probably won’t believe it. Here is a recent, good example I can give you.
I worked on a website that relied mostly on natural link building. Most of the backlinks they got were pointing to the home page and their most popular service. They have spent a lot of money on paying experts for content creation. For their industry they have to. Anyway, they did not create backlinks to these posts. These were very comprehensive, long form and detail posts. They got indexed and ranked for a lot of keywords and many terms ranked 1st for them.
The posts came under the radar of competitors who knew exactly to which posts they should build / order “low quality, super spammy” links to. And it worked because there weren’t enough good backlinks pointing to the post.
It took a disavow task and building a few strong and contextually relevant backlinks to these posts to recover and to make it “not worth” for blackhatters to persue.
Also, I have a background in helping sites recover from manual actions, although I’ve not come across such extreme cases in the last few years.
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