Have you been hit by negative SEO?

[Nocturnalant]

I don't know if I am specifically targeted but I recently had several hundred "automated" visitors on my site in 1 minute, appearing to come from many different countries.

I suspect this is a way to harm a site as they presumably bounce instantly and weaken your average time on page. Have any of you experienced this?

The same 2 days ago. No effect. This traffic even disappeared from Google Analytic stats.

[casino2k.com]

I'm pretty sure on several occasions in the Google Webinars where John Mueller answers questions this has been asked. His answer has always been the same: Google simply ignores irrelevant links these days, as if they are not there. Whether that's true, it's for you to decide.

In one public "SEO Office Hours" hangout I asked John Mueller about negative SEO, bringing my experience. He clearly stated Google is very good in detecting it and ignoring such links, so probably the manual penalty we received was related to something else. After analyzing our link building strategy, we understood our paid links were obviously perceived like a link scheme. After analyzing our site, we found low quality content too, more problematic than some crap links.

[johan_s]

So what you are saying casino2k.com is that you can get a penalty with bad content on your site? That sounds harsh. What is a typical example of bad content in this case?

[xecutable]

Not exactly a penalty. Imagine this scenario: a guy is doing laps and is a slow runner. That's your bad content. For a while, he's the only runner around and is always first. After a while ten other runners join, who are faster. Though he is not penalized for his slow running, he's now 11th.

With the newest Passage update, I imagine a lot of super long articles that were a wall of text and had poor readability can now rank, because google highlights the portion someone was looking for.

[casino2k.com]

So what you are saying casino2k.com is that you can get a penalty with bad content on your site? That sounds harsh. What is a typical example of bad content in this case?

johan_s sorry I've edited my previous post, I missed a sentence.

Probably negative SEO had triggered a manual review, clearly showing our (bad) link building strategy, that lead to a manual action.
External bad links can be ignored by google (to void negative SEO attacks), but published thin content cannot be ignored and can lower the overall quality of your site and brand.

[johan_s]

Thanks Matteo for explaining

[tome1122]

Not yet

[thegioislot]

Yea, i have been got hit around 2 Weeks ago, now the traffic still dancing

[Paint Man]

We haven't yet had to deal with negative SEO

[Jambo]

Fortunately, we haven't had any negative effects so far, even if weird spam links appear every week.

[OscarKaramba]

I'm not sure actually but I got a lot of incoming links from .pw domains atm. Have you experieced something similar?

[alkis]

Same here, same domains, no follow links. Nothing to worry about.

[efialtis]

Has anyone experienced anything like this before?

I have been seeing strange visits for days now, mainly to the same pages of my site and they are coming from Russia with Analytics showing ref traffic via Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, VKontakte and then from some click.mymail.ru, ok.ru etc. This has been going on for quite some time now and it`s obviously no real traffic, I just don`t know what this is about.

[carl2603GL]

I would not worry too much about spammy backlinks that have been targeted at your site - i think google is good at deciphering and ignoring these types of links and looking at your back link profile and assessing how clean or spammy it is. If most of your links are from clean/ authoritative domains, google wont penalise u for a spammy domain back link or even for 20 spammy backlinks depending on how big your backlink profile is and what type of of links the rest of your profile are and where they come from. For sure I would still disavow any spammy domain but I dont think google would penalize my site even if i left it since I have so many authoritative, thematically related and good mentions in my case

[Jayesh Bhattar]

Negative consequences can only be from incorrect and irrelevant content, dozens of your sites can still copy your content. This is frustrating. -.-

[LowFlyingBird]

nothing about the negative what not that goes on day to day.

Own observation from our own sites rankings.

Blogger content doesn't have to be great and or human readable to help build your site's rankings.
I assume better content is more readable, clickable, searchable and mostly sharable.

Emphasis should be on formatting and write uniquely as possible.
Length is debatable. 500+ words should suffice each post
Quality builds efficacy. Quality Content that ensures it's an asset for your business and helps your audience


Page speed optimizer. Instant boost.

Quality backlinks and guest posts should improve rankings.
Keep in mind new sites would be a waste and only fully optimized sites should buy links.

Increasing traffic volume - improved rankings.
Increase keywords - improve rankings

Upgraded Server and WP core and design only UI and UX improvements no change in rankings.

SEO tweaks that are less important:
Spending time fixing all the site errors if not critical errors could be a waste of time.

I did a SEMrush audit and went through all the fixes.
Little to no impact on site performance or rankings.

[CHIC21]

Google's algorithms have been able to detect this for a long time. at least running some site by a hrumer in order to overwhelm the competitors - no longer gives a result.

[pinzoro]

I think there is no other way but to use the link disavow tool in Google Search Console.

After that, I think it's all about how well you solve the user's problem.

[Jayesh Bhattar]

I think there is no other way but to use the link disavow tool in Google Search Console.

After that, I think it's all about how well you solve the user's problem.

I don't think this tool still works correctly. In my opinion, Google automatically ranks your backlinks if it notices abnormal activity from spam resources.

[birenramanathan]

Oh yeah! My domain was spammed by a lot of bad links. I had to fight with it.