Too many people are falling for the propaganda. A general feeling of impending doom is sweeping across the Internet Marketing community as people talk up the possibility of “negative SEO” in Web forums, blogs, podcasts, and conferences.
I have dealt with negative SEO several times across the years. It’s never a pleasant experience but it’s much different from what most people are experiencing. If you’re losing traffic and you see links in your backlink profiles that you don’t recognize, that doesn’t mean you’re experiencing negative SEO.
Most of the people — about 9 out of 10 — who think they are victims of negative SEO are NOT being targeted that way. Of course, those 9 out of 10 people all insist they are the exceptions who really are. This is because there is so much widespread ignorance involved in backlink analysis to begin with.
Negative SEO is generally accepted as a hostile entity placing a large volume of obviously spammy links that point of your Website. These links, if noticed by a search engine, are supposed to produce a search penalty for your site. A few years ago people called this “Google bowling” but it was always a tactic that a few highly competitive people used against each other “in certain verticals”.
The widespread availability of easy link placement tools and services today makes the possibility of running a negative SEO campaign against someone easier to realize but there still has to be a reason to target someone. Link spammers who use these tools are already struggling with their own self-imposed penalties; taking down competitors isn’t going to help them.
On top of the ineffectiveness of targeting competitors while your own sites are penalized the link spammers are also facing a looming apocalypse. The supply of easily exploitable proxy IP addresses is dwindling faster than the proxy services can replace them. As more and more Websites implement anti-spamming measures the pool of available proxies becomes more easily identified. Over the past few months I have seen a significant uptick of spammer complaints about blocked proxies in several Web forums.
So the idea that suddenly a multitude of negative SEO campaigns is spreading across the Internet is not supported by the reality that negative SEO offers little return on investment and isn’t a good use of resources for the people most likely to have the tools to implement it.
First Step in Recovering from negative SEO: Reality Check
You may be seeing a lot of strange links in your backlink reports but unless you’re looking at thousands of different hosts (root domains and subdomains) you’re not being targeted for negative SEO. The fact that a sitewide link on a 90,000-page Website suddenly appears doesn’t mean you’re being hit by a negative SEO campaign.
The more these strange links look (to you) like someone paid for them, the less likely they are actually part of a negative SEO campaign. negative SEO — when it happens — happens quickly and on a scale that no one can afford to pay for. If they are “paid for” that is only happening in the Fiverr Channel — literally, cheap automated spam that costs only a few dollars to arrange.
So if those new links are not negative SEO, what are they? They could be automated links coming from made-for-advertising Website information tools. There are now hundreds, perhaps thousands of these Websites. They grab as much WHOIS information as they can, they buy data from rogue crawlers, and they are built on databases of information “about Websites”. These may not be helpful links but it would take far more resources to arrange a negative SEO campaign through these sites than most people could put to the task. Cheap Web hosting won’t allow you to build an unlimited number of SQL databases and as far as I have seen, these sites are hosted all over the world.
A negative SEO campaign is most likely going to rely on blog comment links, forum profile links, social media profile links, and spam blog articles (spun). These are links that can all be created quickly and easily with cheap software and relatively little effort. These are the kinds of links that Web spammers use to puff up their own sites in churn-and-burn SEO.
If you’re not seeing a lot of these kinds of backlinks, you’re most likely NOT being hit by negative SEO.
If you ARE seeing these kinds of backlinks, and you know you never placed them and your site’s previous owner(s) never placed them, then you may be a victim of negative SEO.
Second Step in Recovering from Negative SEO: Link Research
It could be that some idiot who doesn’t know what he is doing is trying to knock you out of the SERPs. You may see only hundreds instead of tens of thousands of naughty links coming around. In that case you should be okay. Just file a Disavow Request with Bing and Google and explain to them what you think is going on.
If, however, you’re seeing tens of thousands of naughty links suddenly appear in your backlink profile you won’t be able to document them all. You should file a Disavow Request but I would make it clear I was only providing a sampling of backlinks.
If, however, your site is actively attracting new links naturally your task is a little more difficult. One of the mistakes I see people making today is that when they see links coming in from small blogs and forum discussions they disavow those links. There is no reason to do that when these are legitimate blog posts and forum discussions. The search engines don’t hate those kinds of links.
Use good judgment. Don’t just assume that a link is bad because it’s coming from a Website you never heard of. There are over 200 million active Websites today. I guarantee you haven’t heard of most of them.
Third Step in Recovering from Negative SEO: Identify the Anchor Text
If the negative SEO campaign is well designed it’s targeting specific types of anchor text. A brutal negative SEO campaign may try to associate your Website with a lot of irrelevant keywords. This is good to know. You can point it out when you contact the search engines.
If, however, the anchor text is really targeting keywords you try to compete for, you may have to make some tough decisions. Here is the thing: if you have been using any kind of link building that seeks targeted anchor text, you’ll have to explain to the search engines how your link acquisition is different from what is being done to you.
In the worst case scenario you’ll need to change keyword priorities. Sure, there are people out there telling you to contact Webmasters to get bad links taken down. But I guarantee you that if you’re a victim of negative SEO most of those links are coming from Websites that have been abandoned or whose owners are not going to tolerate any link removal requests. These sites are polluted with spam already.
You need to understand if someone is trying to get your site tagged for irrelevant keywords or if they are trying to drive you out of specific keyword SERPs.
Fourth Step in Recovering from Negative SEO: Be Honest About What You Have Done
Remember that 9-out-of-10 people who think they are victims of negative SEO really are NOT. In most cases they are panicking over nothing (they don’t understand how natural backlink profiles look) or they are the victims of their own link building.
Matt Cutts recently suggested that a lot of people who are complaining to Google about negative SEO are really victims of self-imposed NAUGHTY SEO: they built those links themselves, or hired someone to do it.
You’re not going to fool a search engine’s Web spam team into feeling sympathy for you if they see a pattern of spammy link acquisition over any extended period of time. If you bought a previously existing Website and did not file a Reconsideration Request with the search engines (per their recommendations) to let them know about the change in ownership, you’re still responsible for all those old spammy links the previous owner(s) set up.
If Contacting Webmasters Looks Practical, It’s NOT Negative SEO
The worst advice I see coming out of the Internet Marketing blogosphere these days is to contact all the Websites you believe are being used against you. Trust me, if someone is doing something naughty and nasty to you, there isn’t enough time left in your life for you to contact all those Websites. I don’t care whose link database you’re using, you will not be able to send out enough takedown requests.
So you need to stop and slap yourself if someone shows up claiming they can help you with your negative SEO campaign. No decent, honest SEO agency or consultant is going to come out of nowhere to help with negative SEO. THEY can’t contact enough Websites, either.
I have heard a couple of credible accounts (that I cannot verify) where people saw suspicious backlinks appear in their profiles and then soon afterward someone contacted them about getting those links taken down.
If an SEO provider comes soliciting business for link removal for “negative SEO’, I recommend you mention them when you file your Disavow request.
The Problem is Real, But …
Negative SEO is not as widespread as most people believe it is. There is too little money in it for the people you fear might benefit from it. With no economic incentive to waste their resources on what would be a temporary reduction in your search traffic, the majority of your competitors are not going to waste their time trying to poison your backlink profile.
If they really use these tools in the first place they are still trying to get their own sites to rank. Why would they turn links they believe work for them against your Websites? That’s just helping you from their point of view.
So when you read all these paranoia blog posts that promise to tell you how to recover from this kind of nefarious activity, remember that these people are selling dreams, tools, ebooks, and services. They’ll tell you anything they think you’ll believe just so you’ll give them some money.
In most cases you don’t need to hire an SEO to deal with a negative SEO campaign. It’s a rare enough situation that a simple Disavow and/or Reconsideration Request can get the situation straightened out. The search engines know what your normal backlink profile looks like.
Read More about Search Engine Optimization
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Natural Backlink Profile: Endless Ways to Build One
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I’ve bought a domain with several backlinks that I don’t want.
How to file a consideration request if I’ve not Manual Action issue?!
You use the same procedure as for a penalty, but explain when you took ownership of the domain. Or just file a Disavow request for all the old links.