Negative SEO to inner page: remove page or disavow links?

[howardd]

Someone decided to run a negative-SEO campaign, hitting one of the inner pages on my blog I noticed the links started to pile up yesterday but I assume there will be more to come over the next few days.

The targeted page is of little value to my blog, so the question is: should I remove the affected page (hoping that the links won't affect the entire site) or to submit a disavow request?

I'm not concerned about what happens to the affected page, but I want to make sure the entire site doesn't get affected as a result of the negative-SEO.

Thanks in advance.

Howard

[Chris.Menke]

Howard, If the page isn't of importance to you, yes, you could just remove the page.  You could also change the url of the page and let all of those links unresolved.  If the links are not targeting a live page on your domain they won't have an impact on your domain.

[MarieHaynes]

If this is a page that is not important to you then I'd definitely remove it.  Removing the page is the same as removing the links in Google's eyes.  Just be sure that you don't redirect that url to another on your site.

[howardd]

Thanks Chris and Marie! I was thinking of doing a 401 (page permanently moved) and transferring the content to a new page with a new url.

[MarieHaynes]

If you're transferring the content then make sure that the old pages are out of the index before you get the new page up.  I had a situation where I consulted with a client who was starting a new site because the old was hit severely by Penguin.  He bought a new domain and we moved all the content to there.  We did no 301 redirects from the old to the new and there were no links from the old to the new at all.  Yet, a couple of weeks later, the WMT backlinks to the new content showed all of the same links as the old site!  They all said, "Via...oldsite.com".   It was like Google recognized a canonical here and attributed the links to the new page.

The old site was gone, but was still in the Google cache.  We had to manually remove each old url using the url removal tool and then the problem resolved.

[howardd]

Thanks Marie. I went ahead and deleted that page and submitted a disavow request. Hopefully that will prevent any future issues.