Competitor trying to sabotage our rankings - Negative SEO

[playcasino1]

Hi Guys

I need some advice...

We've just noticed that our link profile for our site www.PlayCasino.co.za has increased by a couple of thousand within 2 months. There are hundreds of signature links from spammy blogs/forums and bad neighbourhoods pointing to our site. Most of these are from porn , japanese , russian and whole lot of crappy sites.

It definitely sounds like we are being targeted by a competitor whose aim is to get us penalized by Google and/or hurt our rankings

Here are just 2 examples from the hundreds:
xxhttp://freecam3x.com/blog/hungry-for-sex-she-masturbates-with-a-brush/
xxhttp://escortsspain.es/una-via-de-escape-de-la-monotonia/
(view source on the site and search for playcasino.co.za to find the signature with anchor text and link)

How do we combat this?
Can these crappy signature links hurt our rankings? (i hope not )
What is the easiest way to remove these bad links?
Most of them are nofollow links - can we ignore the nofollow links or does Google also consider these links
Is there a way to find out the person responsible for this?

It makes me sick to think that a fellow affiliate has taken time out of his/her day to engage in this crap!

Please help.

[UTG]

Yes, those links can hurt your rankings. Unfortunately. I've been through the same thing a few times and there are some options for you, like for instance:
* Disavow those backlinks as soon as you discover them.
* Disavow those backlinks when you believe that they have affected your rankings.
* Build backlinks from domains with high trust and use branded or generic anchor texts.

Some people would probably argue that you shouldn't try to fix what ain't broken, but option 1 worked best for me. If you wait until your site drops it rankings you will most likely lose a big part of your organic traffic. Fix it before it becomes a problem!

You should obviously have a good link profile, but I don't believe building new backlinks is a good way to combat a negative SEO attack.

[Fortune Palace]

Fairly rife at the moment, I'm afraid, and very difficult to find out who's behind it.

Best course of action is to keep on top of the latest links (use the 'Download latest links' option in GWT) and regularly update your Disavow list. Difficult with thousands of links, but you can disavow at domain level.

I wouldn't recommend waiting to see if it becomes a problem because by the time you realise it is, it'll be too late.

[DaftDog]

As a fellow South African affiliate I'm sorry to see this happening to you.

Have you considered that this negative seo campaign may result from a disgruntled affiliate company rather than a fellow webmaster?

[playcasino1]

Thanks Guys

We have downloaded the links from GWT and it shows that we have 2900 links from +-600 unique sites.
However, when we look at a report from MOZ, it shows that we have over 19,000 links from 1600 unique sites/root domains.

Could this discrepancy be due to MOZ including nofollow links and Google not? Do we still need to disavow these nofollow links?

Ixian - You're right; it could very well be an affiliate program. Buy why?

[Nibor]

Different tools will catch different numbers of links. I Would say if you have already gone down the disavow route, then you might as well go ahead and disavow it all - just to be on the safe side. Although having to audit that many links is not going to be fun. My sympathy's to you, being attacked terrible.

[TravG]

This happened to me also and unfortunately I wasnt proactive and didnt do anything about it. I then got hit with a penalty from Google and while I have submitted a disavow file, I do not think the website will ever preform like it did. It has been about 2.5 months now and my rankings are nowhere where they use to be. It sucks because you put all that work into something and some jackass does that and messes the whole thing up.

Right now another of my sites is being hit the same thing. Gained over 1000 links in 5 days! I did do a link disavow and actually just contacted Google yesterday to tell them what is going on and actually asked recommendations from them how to combat this. If/when they get back to me I will post it here for sure.

[louie.wilson]

Disavow links seems to be the best strategy indeed.
May take some time but you better do it now before you start seeing a bad impact on your positions.

[sweetbet]

The thing about the disavow tool is that according to Matt Cutts, google doesn't always disavow the links you submit via the disavow tool. They reserve the right to pick and choose which links to disavow. Matt Cutts said this in one of his videos.

[DaftDog]

The thing about the disavow tool is that according to Matt Cutts, google doesn't always disavow the links you submit via the disavow tool. They reserve the right to pick and choose which links to disavow. Matt Cutts said this in one of his videos.

That is understandable, otherwise the disavow tool would become a weapon.

[Nibor]

I read this article last night. It is very long, but definitely worth a scan read at least. It sums up the farce that Google has created around link penalties, and their duplicitous actions and statements:

http://www.seobook.com/divide-and-conquer-algorithm?utm_content=buffer39298&utm_medium=socia l&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

[-Shay-]

Also worth consideration in this discussion is that there is a possibility that Google interprets the disavowed links "differently" than one would initially think.

For example, suppose a webmaster purchases links - say ten links per month for the first six months of the new website's existence. In month 5, someone slams a negative seo campaign their way and points 3k **** links at them.

The webmaster on is "on top of things", notices the neg campaign and thus disavows the garbage links - leaving only the 50 "paid links".

Possible dilemma

- while you have taken the time to disavow the garbage, is your failure to disavow the ones you have purchased an indirect admission that you are buying?

- if you do not want to take any chances and just disavow all links, including the ones you bought, any benefit that you may have reaped from buying the links have been cancelled out.

Additionally, I think that if a common sense negative seo approach was taken, they'd probably hammer the sites you obtained links from with garbage links as well - thus further attempting to negate the impact of those links you have bought (or earned).

My take today is still the same as it was in the pre-disavow days. I do not build links and we're ranking just fine. Focus on the things you can control (quality on site experience with well constructed/written content). Then, if any links are coming in, you can decide for yourself immediately whether they are "earned", "wanted", or if they're part of a negative campaign and if they're of the latter, you can immediately disavow.

[playcasino1]

thanks for your feedback and comments guys.

I am going ahead and disavowing them today, however, do I disavow the entire list of 1600 domains all at once, or should i do them in small batches of say 100?

[Nibor]

I don't know of any advantage to doing lots of small disavow's. I would just go for the one big one.

[louie.wilson]

Seems like 1 file, with 1 URL per line, and domain when several links per domain is the way to go.
No need to go for multiple submissions: https://support.google.com/webmaster.../2648487?hl=en

[tryme]

As someone who has gone through this for a major ecommerce client, here's what to do:

Get all the links you can find - don't just rely on Google Webmaster Tools or Moz. Use Ahrefs and Majestic too.

The GWT report only shows a sample of your links and if you do a disavowal based on that, you'll find that you get a completely different link set the next time you download links in GWT.

So, definitely, definitely use all the sources you can.

Disavow everything (at domain level) you don't want. It doesn't matter whether they are follow or nofollow links. Just kill 'em off.

If you're not penalised already: this should be enough to do the job. You may find that you get a ranking rise or even a drop after the disavowals have taken effect. Unless you also get a manual links warning, don't worry about this.

[grem]

Make sure you stay on top of your links, traffic sources and when your brand, site or link is being mentioned. You can setup many alerts to this like google alerts as one example.

This is the downside of the industry as well as how google operates and their lack of response or care when it comes to trying to deal with google.

[petefader]

your best chance is to Disavow those links in GWT!

[TheWaiter]

If you had 100,000 links to your website Google may only take note of 5% of them, negative SEO is actually harder to accomplish than one may expect. If you are wanting to do negative SEO it would be more beneficial to actually remove high quality links than to build thousands of spammy ones.

[casinopowerguide]

I had something similar happen to me. You will never be able to prove who did it, but I wouldn't put it past some rogue affiliate company. I remeber I placed one on a blacklist for non payment, and a few months later I noticed that I had thousands of spam blog comments, targeted to 3 specific pages on my site, including the home page, all originating on 2 particular dates.

You should definitely disavow all these links, do a domain disavow, and request that they be taken down, although success rate depends, many blogs that allow spam are not usually maintained, although some do not know that that is happening.

That is just my experience. Comment spam won't affect substantially on it's own because anyone can exploit that, but if you have other black marks too then it will go against you. Good luck with it.