Negative seo links

[Samstore]

This post is deleted!

[matbennett]

Check here: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

Algo update last friday. Have you checked webmaster tools for any messages? If you have a warning about bad backlinks then you probably have been penalised for such. If not you are more likely to have just lost out by no longer receiving the benefit from links that are not good quality but were previously helping.

Historically all sorts of junk links have helped boost rankings.  As a result lots of people looking to improve rankings for a website (either their own or one they were promoting) acquired such links. Benefit gained from many such links has low been removed.  When this benefit is removed it can look a lot like a penalty as you slide down the rankings, when in fact it is a correction.

The other big illusion is that people automatically assume this is negative SEO.  Negative SEO is very rare. SEO that no longer works is very common.  It is much more likely that this is evidence of the latter.

It;'s hard to give specific advice without seen the site / link profile. However I'd usually advice to focus on new quality links rather than spend too much energy on the old links.  There are exceptions to that (and I also know that lots of people just wouldn't agree with it).  My main exception would be if all those backlinks had over optimised anchor text.

[Samstore]

Hi,

Thanks for your message. I know for a fact that this is negative SEO as since we started ranking in September, over 200 links from similar forum profiles (in some cases multiple profiles from the same domain) were set up, all linking using the keyword that we were ranking well for.

I am the only one that does any link building for this site so they were definitely added by somebody else.