Negative SEO campaign just started against my site. What do I do?

[jonathan79]

As the question says, I have just got alerts of new links, being clearly a negative seo campaign against my site.

We are talking, lots of spammy, rude anchor text type keywords being used.  Whilst I only have alerts of a small number (around 30), it has just happened and I know from the type of spammy links they are that more will be coming.

So, question is, should I disavow?  Do I keep submitting new disavows every few days as more are discovered?

Any advice will be greatly be appreciated.

[LesleyPaone]

If it were me, this is what I would do. I would export all of your back links from google webmaster tools. You can do this by going to webmaster tools -> links to your site -> all domains and click to export table.

From there I would if possible go through the list and make a master list of "good" links. Take that list of good links and copy that column into a text file as and save it as a reference point of good quality links. Then every day I would go and download the latest links from webmaster tools, copy and put them in a text file as well. Then I would use beyond compare to see the new links to the site by comparing the "master good link file" to the daily generated files. If you have time, go through the different links and see if any of them are legitimate good quality links. If it is too many, I would just start disavowing them all until the attack is over.

I would also think about signing up to other services as well, like ahrefs and the others that have crawlers, because one crawler will not find all of the links more than likely and from experience GWT will not show you every link either.

[jonathan79]

Hi  thanks.

Yeh, just signed up with cognitive seo which amalgamates from ahrefs and others.  I have hundreds of spammy links.

Looks like I have my work cut out here.  Will go through webmaster tools next.

Thanks

Jonathan

[garrettkite]

Jonathan - I would suggest doing the same thing that Lesley mentioned in order to make sure that you are only disavowing the spam links. You might also want to try dealing with the spammer directly, if possible.

If the links are coming primarily from the same source, you might be able to resolve the issue directly with the spammer. That might be far fetched, but we had a recent issue with spam links on a small scale, from a disgruntled customer of one of our clients. Unfortunately the customer never expressed any frustration to the client, and instead started posting negative reviews, links with negative anchor text, etc. We were actually able to contact the spammer directly, resolve their frustration with the client's product and the spammer actually started doing the complete opposite - changed negative reviews to positive, and it ended better than we could have anticipated.

This might not work for your particular situation, but just thought I would share.

[jonathan79]

I have no idea who may have done it.  I have just submitted my disavow file, with 130 domains.  More than I thought.

So at least I can sleep easy now, and will just keep an eye on it over the next few weeks.

Thanks for the responses,... pretty much confirmed what I thought.

[Andy-Halliday]

this is the one thing I dread happening.

Apart from what you are doing there isn't a lot until it stops - I wish there was a button in web-master tools to tell Google that a competitor (and it usually is) is doing bad SEO to your site.

If you do try anything other, then please share. I am currently putting together an contingency plan in case it ever happens to the site I manage.

I can see this becoming more prevalent in future and a lot more companies using these tactics to get an SEO advance. I could even see some dodgy SEO agency's setting up to offer this type of service.

[jonathan79]

Andy - I am actually using cognitiveseo which incorporates all the links from places like moz, majestic and ahrefs.  You can also import your webmaster tool links as well with a few clicks.

It then has a link browser, highlights unnatural links (which you can modify), and will create a disavow file for you.  After the initial panic, when I wrote my first post here, I know feel quite comfortable with how I am dealing with it.

I think the stats update every couple of days, so its not instant like going to places like ahrefs and majestic direct, but as it collates all the data from all sites I can deal with that limitation.