Hit by Negative SEO

[DarrenX]

I've seen some discussion here about whether or not negative seo is real.

I've just spent 6 months recovering from Penguin, rewriting content, removing hundreds of bad links, and seeing our traffic slowly improve.

Yesterday we noticed in Google webmasters tools that we're ranking for the term "Free Sex."  Here... http://screencast.com/t/ezoo2sCRXQ

Now we have discovered that thousands of "sex" links have been directed at our improving domain. I am convinced I know who the culprit is.

What would you advise a client to do in my situation?

Forget about removing these damn links. I don't have the time, money or energy to go through that again. I'm sure he can add them much faster than I can ever remove them.

Is the disavow tool best answer in this case? Or is there an international court of seo justice that I can appeal to?

[CMC-SD]

If you're 100% sure who did it, and you're willing to put yourself out there and name-and-shame, you can do that. I'm not sure that's in your best interests, though. I would just keep a close eye on the situation and disavow aggressively.

[IPROdigital]

Yeah, I'd agree with that - disavow sounds like a good bet.

[BrianCrouch]

" I am convinced I know who the culprit is." I would tell a client to spend a bit of time sleuthing for evidence to corroborate that confident assertion. If you can flesh out a very strong case, I would then take it to Google spam team, and possibly talk to an attorney about sending a "we're on to you" letter. There's no criminal case, but a civil judgment need only show that they took actions that hurt you. The mere act of calling them out and threatening a suit will probably stop the abuse (well, unless you're dealing with a sociopath).

Definitely disavow the toxic links when necessary though...

[TLM]

Brian and IPRO both suggest that you use the disavow links tool that Google recently rolled out. That may wind up being the answer in the long run but Matt Cutts, in a recent GoogleWebmasterHelp video, seems to stress the fact that this tool should be used after exhausting other link-removal attempts.

Barry, over at seroundtable, has a straight forward write up about this on his blog and even includes a sample (quoted below) of what it is he thinks Google is looking for in a disavow action.

Here is a link to the specific article I am speaking of: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-disavow-link-tool-15848.html

I know you want a quick and relatively painless fix, but Google tends to be vague in that regard and I doubt, unfortunately, that such a fix exists in a situation like this.

*Contact those who run the sites where the links are coming from, and keep a record of your interaction with them.

*E-mail all relevant parties until you get some sort of answer, positive or negative. If you get no response make a note of that.

*Contact Google with a spam report (probably won't get a non-automated response quickly or at all), and make a note of your report submissions/

*If none of these, or other methods I am sure I must be leaving out, solve the issue, format and submit a detailed disavow file.

WIsh I could offer the silver bullet but, as far as I am aware, that bullet has yet to exist.

[DarrenX]

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

I spent about 5 hours yesterday picking out bad links from good, and sent them to Google through their disavow tool.

I wondered how this could happen (I guess I live in Candy Land) and it took me about 2 minutes to find people on Fiverr selling 25,000 "bad links" for $5.  That's scary, and it seems Google has wrought this with Penguin. I can't work this hard everytime someone wants to spend $5.

My hope is that my site withstands the attack. So far so good, really, but it sure is annoying when you're trying hard to clean things up and do the right thing going forward.

Maybe Google should offer a Disavow Query tool, whereby you could tell it if certain queries are misdirecting traffic to your site. That way I could let them know at the front end that my site has nothing to do with "free sex."

[CMC-SD]

That's an awesome idea. It wouldn't be difficult for them to algorithmically verify that your site is totally not relevant for a given query.

[DarrenX]

So send a note to the webspam team? I'm not into public shaming. I don't think these guys have any shame.

It's pretty obvious to me based on my history with a certain company. There's only about four of us in this particular niche. Lo and behold, only 3 of us were spammed ( I saw in some of the web spam that 2 other competitors were often linked to from the same page). They targeted a very specific page on my site, so that tells me clearly the keywords they are trying to knock me down for. Given this other company's history of aggressive tactics (spamming our blog posts, spamming comments on shareware sites where we are listed, spamming our ratings and simultaneously saying their product is better, building out dozens of EMD sites, etc etc), given that some of the spam was in their native language, and that I recognize some of the aliases they have used in the past,  I have a pretty strong hunch I know who I'm dealing with.

My hope is that nothing happens to my serp so they won't be encouraged to keep doing it. That's the real danger I see; if it works, certainly they'll keep doing it.

[DarrenX]

Just a followup to this old thread for anyone working through similar issues.

We are monitoring what Google finds through their "Download Latest Links."  We add the domains where the bad links are to the Disavow Links tool.

Google no longer ranks the site for any "sex" terms. No warnings have been issued to the site in 4 months. Things are stable at the moment, but we're going to be picking the lint out of this link list for a long time.