Negative SEO, any experiences?

[xelaetaks]

Anyone here ever get hit with negative SEO?

When doing link removal outreach someone sent me one hndred links asking for money to remove them. I look in ahrefs adn a keyword density went from maybe 4% to over 24% overnight! I added the links to disavow but find it disturbing considerung people aren't sure how well it looks and now to Google it could possibly look spammy wyen in actuality I was trying to remove backlinks.

I made a post on Google forum aboyt it and sent a messgae to John Mueller, whether that will help I don't know. Google doesn't seems to acknowledge negative SEO much so I hope it doesn't screw me over wfter my clean up efforts this may also be arguably one of the problems with Penguin - it opens up this kind of business online.

[GreyBeard123]

What if a site is deindexed that sends neg seo does google ignore those links?

Yes..

Can a webowner or even webhost get a legal case for neg seo if there is proof such as the owner sending a list of links to solicit for money ?

No..

[micklearn]

Thats what your up against.

Thanks for posting that, seoskunk, all very true. And sometimes it's impossible to figure out who was responsible for taking down a site or suddenly having a page(s) knocked out of top SERP rankings after ranking well for 10+ years. Negative SEO? Yes. It. Does. Happen.

[Clay_More]

Duplicating the site

Forcing canonical problems on a site (canonical problems don't end with redirecting to www.)

Feeding the site content out to other blogs, sites in small snippets

Duplicating the site through proxies and translation servers

Scraping the site and redistributing content and meta titles and descriptions

I can't speak to any of the other issues you raised, but three of these appear to be site duplication problems. If you are first published and have the juice to support it, most sites won't outrank you for your content.

I've seen what you describe as a canonical issue although I don't believe it is negative seo. There are ways to address it which will minimize the impact to your site. Be creative with htaccess.

Feeding site content to other blogs. Really? What happens when you set up a feed? Of course people are going to set up auto blogs with your feed content. We go back to that concept of getting more juice.

Page rank - authority - trust
These are all inter-related, if you have enough reputable sites pointing to your site(s), search engine confusion seems to disappear on it's own.

[Nutterum]

@xelaetaks question :Can a webowner or even webhost get a legal case for neg seo if there is proof such as the owner sending a list of links to solicit for money ? - Yes in the US you can as far as I know there were couple of cases. In the UK I think you have a shot as well, perhaps in Germany. Outside of these countries I heavily doubt anyone would even know what neg SEO is let alone care enough to build a case.

And that is the best and the worst part of the internet realy. You are free to do pretty much anything at the cost of not having regulations to back you up. What is more we are talking SERP results showed by a company - many would argue that if you do not like it and don`t have the skills, its your fault.

All in all I feel that the more Panda, Penguin and other Google animals increase in effectiveness the more grey/black hat SEO will stop and move on to negative SEO techniques in order to get ahead....sad really.

[fathom]

The trouble is goodroi you have no actual experience of neg seo, unfortunately I do.

Not sure how being an 'alleged' victim constitute as having experience.

[glakes]

Not sure how being an 'alleged' victim constitute as having experience.

Maybe because they were able to monitor the entire situation, judge how their efforts helped/failed and are best prepared to see the long-term impact.

There's quite a substantial difference in experience and knowledge obtained from being a victim vs being a bystander. For example, reading about a college course leaves me less knowledgeable about the subject matter than someone that actually participated in the program.

[fathom]

So being a victim of worthless SEO makes you a self-taught-Negative-SEOer.

I guess I'll agree.

[mrengine]

Not sure how being an 'alleged' victim constitute as having experience.

You must have missed the word "unfortunately" that seoskunk used in his post. That means his experience comes from being a victim and not the "self-taught-Negative-SEOer" that you implied. Rather than beat around the bush, just call seoskunk a liar and a victim of negative seoing his own website. That's what I see you implying from your posts.

This entire thread seems bereft of facts and specifics.

This is true and the forum charter prohibits specific facts that can be evaluated because it would require "outing" websites. I'd like to see more detailed facts discussed on this topic here, but it does not appear that it will happen. At least on this forum the debate will continue or the issue swept under the rug. But there is lot's of information elsewhere, that includes domain names and other specifics, if you just look for it.

[goodroi]

We can discuss negative SEO and specific facts without outing. If you have something to share and aren't sure if it is allowed ask a moderator or admin.

If you don't have specific facts, then propose how best to test negative SEO theories.

PS Let's act like professionals and avoid personal comments/attacks.

[fathom]

Not sure how being an 'alleged' victim constitute as having experience.

You must have missed the word "unfortunately" that seoskunk used in his post. That means his experience comes from being a victim and not the "self-taught-Negative-SEOer" that you implied. Rather than beat around the bush, just call seoskunk a liar and a victim of negative seoing his own website. That's what I see you implying from your posts.

Just because "I" can rank a page does not mean "I" know Google precise secret sauce.

When "I" spend my day ranking pages it is my interpretation of Google secret sauce and not Google's exacting prerequisite.

I don't need any 3rd party to positively (or negatively) impact a domain I can achieve those results on my own. So can seoskunk and all alleged victims AND...

I also believe in

Occam's Razor - The principle states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove correct, but—in the absence of certainty—the fewer assumptions that are made, the better.

Lying maybe not... but misguided is a good probability unless the culprit doing the Negative SEO admitted to it.

[Clay_More]

I have a site where I haven't done anything with it for maybe 2 years and haven't paid much attention to it. Using Majestic stats:
Citation flow of 22
Trust flow of 14
External links 10
Referring domains 3, I know one of them is mine.

An average site is probably going to have citation and trust flow around 20, so this site doesn't have much trust. Citation/Trust is 1.6 which optimally should be around 1.

I would guess this site could be removed from the SERPs with negative SEO because it doesn't have much stability. Don't know why anyone would bother, but that's a different subject.

If I had the time and energy to make it stronger, I'd work on getting some high trust links from diverse sites to build the trust flow number and the referring domains. Then it would be time to build everything up, including content.

Ultimately, people have to want the content.

[GreyBeard123]

I would guess this site could be removed from the SERPs with negative SEO because it doesn't have much stability. Don't know why anyone would bother,

Well, I might bother, as you sound exactly like the plumber/electrician/xyz business ranking at the number one spot..
And that is a major problem to me as I’m only ranking in the third spot, so you get ten times more business than I do…
And that is plain and simple nonsense; I must do something about it…

And so begin something that might evolve into a negative SEO campaign, or whatever you want to call it, from an ordinary site owner…

[Clay_More]

GreyBeard123,

You raise a really valid point as I've never been involved in local with that site. So, what I posted is based on a potential national exposure.
But, local by nature can't be hugely competitive. If you are trying to rank for SomeTown,SomeState Plumber, how hard can it be?
If you want to rank for EveryTown,EveryState Plumber, then that's a different thing and good luck with it.

[toidi]

But, local by nature can't be hugely competitive. 

Local businesses are not competitive? All it takes is one competitor who thinks they can put you out of business by taking out your site.

i don't know if negative seo works but i do know there are businesses who will do whatever it takes to come out on top, so we can expect to see a lot more of it happening.

[seoskunk]

Fathom,

Had to look up "Occam's Razor" which states the simple answer is often correct. The simple answer in this case is I observed negative seo and its impact for a site I built. All the things stated in that list happened and it had a detrimental effect on the sites rankings.

Interestingly during the whole episode I spoke with a internet security expert at well known firm. He told me stories of devastating SME's with negative seo, hacking sites so that forms were redirected to competitors, keylogging internal computers and many other attacks. He told me there are over 2000 vulnerabilities found every day online ( I don't think this included malware). One of the key things we did to recover the site was make it PCI Compliant, preventing XSS and other hacking attempts. One thing that was good about talking to a security expert was confirmation that we were under attack, that we weren't being paranoid or blaming negative seo for short comings of the website and that we were not alone, it was happening to many others.

Re."The trouble is goodroi you have no actual experience of neg seo, unfortunately I do."

Shouldn't have said that, it was out of line. I think the whole experience has left me very touchy on the subject so I apologise for being rude and saying Crap. I'll try and put my point across more eloquently in future.

In the end the site recovered but it took a long time (1 year) and I left the company shortly after as had enough of it all by then. The site got hit again after I left. So I guess it wasn't personal.

[fathom]

I don't doubt Negative SEO can be done.

But without a perparator there is no strategy - there is one assumption being made right there.

[seoskunk]

But without a perparator there is no strategy - there is one assumption being made right there.

No idea what your saying please elaborate

[fathom]

SEO Sabotage requires someone to implement a strategy with an end goal in mind and that goal is to earn profit and then the person flipping the bill that MIGHT gain something with a shift in results.

These are never the same people.

Case Studies don't fall into that realm since the implementer is known (thus no assumption).

[Biggy]

Google says to focus on quality content. I did that, though my content did not get any great incoming links but the quality was of the same level if not better than top ranked sites.(Panda loved it)

I started to rank for great terms and this also attracted spam links. Penguin came (referring to Oct 2013 iteration)

Result: My site got demoted enough to get any converting traffic.

Moral of the story:
The burden of proving urself white hat/innocent webmaster lies entirely on u.

[Nutterum]

@GreyBeard123 - I highly disagree with your example. Unless you talk about insurance or lawyers then - yes you are correct, but trust me when I tell you that if you have the infrastructure in real life in order to facilitate plumbing services nationwide - your website will rock local listings AND nationwide organic search like a boss assuming you have non-braindead SEO and content team.

The reality is that for many businesses (e-commerce websites not included in this statement) its rank local or go home, hence the fierce competition there and from that competition stems the black/grey/negative SEO.

[SerpsGuy]

@seoskunk - You are completely right about how the NegativeSEO is performed. I had those tactics used on my site with GREAT success. I tanked, and only recently recovered - only to have the spammers start the EXACT process over again just days ago. It works really well, and I hate it because it destroys the value of my content and my rankings. I had to rewrite literally ALL my content, some 400+ articles - to recover from it. Now its happening again, and I am throwing my hands up. #*$! it, google wants spam in their index then then can have it. I need a real job.

[Planet13]

So, is there a step-by-step recommendation on how to identify if you are being targeted by negative SEO?

[bhartzer]

Planet13, you need to start by looking at your site's links. I would gather the links from several sources:

Majestic
ahrefs
Open Site Explorer
Google Webmaster Tools

and combine them (use MS Excel to remove duplicates) and start looking at the anchor text. You should be able to spot the links that you built, the ones you didn't, and the natural links that you got.

There are other ways that people do negative SEO, like slowing down your site speed, but generally you'll want to look at your links.

[goodroi]

Regardless of negative SEO, if you care about your Google rankings and general internet marketing effort you should be regularly monitoring your backlinks.

You want to notice if any of your hard won backlinks disappears. Sometime the people that link to us will rewrite their site and forget to put back the link to our site. If any links (especially traffic generating links) disappear you want to know ASAP so you can try to regain it.

You also want to look for suspicious spikes in links or specific anchor text. That could be a sign of negative SEO or an ignorant friend adding an identical link to your site on every page of their off topic site.

Bottom line - keep an eye on your backlinks using the tools bhartzer mentions above.

[EditorialGuy]

You want to notice if any of your hard won backlinks disappears. Sometime the people that link to us will rewrite their site and forget to put back the link to our site.

And sometimes they'll just delete a page, and the links on that page will go away. (For example, if I delete an article that has links as citations, there's no point in having the citations without the article.)

[seoskunk]

Orchestrated attacks I was told by an authority source are only carried out because "You Deserve It". Who is the person that decides you deserve it ? How perfect they must be to pass judgement on others.

[Planet13]

Orchestrated attacks I was told by an authority source are only carried out because "You Deserve It".

Could you elaborate on who the authority source is?

Aside from a scant few people working at google's spam team, I don't know who would be an "authority source" in determining whether someone deserved it (negative SEO).

Just wanting to make sure it was indeed an "authority" source and not simply a "bombastic" one.

_{There are many who would call me a bombastic source...}

[Clay_More]

@Planet13,
Have you noticed there are never any authoritative "this site embarked on negative seo against this other site and was successful" stories?

It is always "we got hit by negative SEO and aren't doing well in the serps".

I'd be more than willing to jump on the negative SEO bandwagon, all I need is something conclusive that shows it exists.