Penalty from Google due to spam that was not our doing

[kylie_rw]

Hi,

My company has enjoyed pretty good rankings for our main keywords in Google for the past 13+ years we have been in business. We have always been very white-hat about our SEO -- always erring on the side of not doing anything rather than risking a penalty.

Well, last Thursday, we received the dreaded Google penalty due to a pattern of unnatural links. The hit is devastating - we are not even in the top 50 for our own company name anymore. Through research, we believe we have found the culprit -- and it has nothing to do with any of our own actions. We operate a discussion forum, and there was a link to one of the threads that was being used as the target for a lot of link spam -- Chinese blog comments, etc. We had nothing to do with this, but obviously someone had an agenda and was working on spamming to this page. Who knows - it may have even been the company that was being discussed negatively in the thread, attempting to have us blocked.

We discovered it the same day we received the penalty notice, and issued a reconsideration request, detailing what we believe we found. So far, we haven't disavowed any of the links, but I am thinking we should. We have asked Google if they're able to just turn off any link juice for that one page, especially since we don't know who is doing this spamming, and whether they will continue.

Has anyone experienced something similar? How does one prevent themselves from receiving a penalty that they had nothing to do with? What is there to keep any competitor from launching a spammy link-building campaign to get their competitor removed from Google? Is there anything we can do to resolve this?

Thanks for any and all thoughts...

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Kylie,

i can can understand your frustration here. A have had lots of clients in the same boat. Negative SEO seems to be quite prevalent.

i would just go through the disavow process and get rid of unnatural or  problematic links. Google said they are pretty good at spotting when it's a target attack, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

-Andy

[GregB123]

If it is just one thread on a forum that was flooded with bad links, you could delete that thread. Make sure that any traffic to the associated URL's get a true 404 response.

My understanding is that doing so shows that you did not want those incoming links and that you are not gaining any advantage from them. If you do another Reconsideration Request, you should probably tell them that the targeted page was deleted.