Negative SEO? Or?

[SmartWebPros]

We had another website attacked by negative SEO, so now I'm getting a little suspicious. The website went from around 26 linking domains to 1001 links from 311 linking domains in webmaster tools. They're all in different languages, and directories.

I asked everyone at the organization and they said they didn't sign up for any services. I trust them, because I know they don't have time to breath right now, with 7 product launches this month.

OSE says 79 links from 26 linking domains, so the spam links must be gone now.. but the website's been wiped pretty much clean from Google.com and is just starting to slowly (very slowing) crawl back

Is there anything else that could be targeting the website with hundreds of links? Anything I can do to protect it? I've disavowed the links, but they're gone now so it probably won't help.

Thanks in advance for ideas

UPDATE:

The website is still not recovering in Google.com. It seems to be ok in .ca, but a recent conundrum is that it's been basically wiped clean from Bing and Yahoo rankings. I've emailed Bing and the team says it is indeed indexed, and not penalized (manually anyways). OLE says the "bad links" are no longer there, but webmaster tools still lists them all (I know, they don't update that often).

My latest strategy is to start building some really strong links into the website with killer content. Their products are amazing (tv lift furniture) so it shouldn't be difficult. Just time consuming! I'm also being super-active on their social media platforms, to see if this helps boost rankings in the mean time.

Any further tips to recover from negative SEO?
(Note: I do not need link removal tools. We have a process that's working just fine).

[BlueprintMarketing]

If the webmaster is actually targeting you and trying to hurt your website. And I am sure there are people in this world that will try to do the stupid things and I would be really pissed if I were you. However I think it's good that you're asking everyone prior to appointment fingers.

If anybody points that links to your website and is responsible for that website or has access to it they may not care if it is complete junk and may use it only for negative SEO however they will be heard by Google what I would do unfortunately is you must follow the rules when removing bad links. One tool I like to use is

http://www.removeem.com/

I primarily like it because it is made by company that is recommended here at Moz

called

http://www.virante.org/

If you check out their URL http://www.virante.org/ is has interesting tools for checking out links. However unfortunately at this time I do not believe there's anything that you can do to prevent anyone from linking to your website without. I think unfortunately that this is a huge problem that Google will have to deal with and should deal with. I would make it extremely clear to them when you have tried to contact the webmasters if they refuse that you believe that they are in fact targeting you for negative SEO and I think Google at a lot of pressure to them hopefully putting them in a separate category than others in the future but we can only hope for that Google welcome up with a solution for this problem as it really is something anybody can do to anyone else and an unfortunate scenario I feel extremely bad that you actually have to go through this at work in order to deal with something that somebody else's maliciously done to you.

I hope this of is of help.

Sincerely,

Thomas

[BlueprintMarketing]

I apologize I spoke to early. However I think most of these things you already know

All information I could find pertaining to preventing resisting or blocking negative SEO

The information contained in the info graph below is also in the search engine Journal negative SCO link below this it also has a whiteboard Friday with Rands comments I hope this is of more help then my frist post

You can also do a free background check I don't know if I mentioned this before where it basically checked your anchor text using

http://www.removeem.com/

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/negative-seo-what-it-is-how-to-protect-yourself/43149/

http://www.seobook.com/learn-seo/infographics/goldilocks.php

Matt Cutts in this video speaks about Google being resistant to negative SEO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=HWJUU-g5U_I

http://www.webpronews.com/google-is-very-resistant-to-negative-seo-2012-12

http://www.brickmarketing.com/blog/negative-seo.htm

Simply reference Information regarding negative SEO

http://www.seobook.com/negative-seo

http://kaiserthesage.com/negative-seo/

http://www.catcreatives.com/can-negative-seo-really-get-your-site-penalized/

http://www.sitepoint.com/can-negative-seo-really-get-your-site-penalized/

http://www.seobook.com/pre-negative-seo

Sincerely,

Thomas

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[SmartWebPros]

Thanks, but the links have already been removed. They were there long enough to cause significant damage on Google.com though. Now we'll have to wait for Google to crawl the site again...

I'm more interested in finding out if it was indeed negative SEO, or it's linked to a specific directory or.... ???

I looked at removeem.com and it doesn't look like it would be useful for this, as they're short term attacks.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Just thought you may want to look for that people competing with you for the most for the keywords that they probably putting in the anchor text and try to figure out who is actually spamming you I know this sounds very hard but maybe this can help here some great free tools

PageRank Recovery Tool
Many sites lose a lot of potential PageRank because sites link to incorrect URLs. This tool helps you find them and automatically generate the 301 redirects you need to recover that PageRank.

Link Atrophy Diagnostic Tool
Identify the rate of top link atrophy on your site. If your top links are being removed at a high pace, you won't see positive rankings. Powered by SEOMoz Labs.

Competitive Analysis Tool
SEO is a competition. You have to be more popular and more relevant than your competitors to succeed. Just type in your keyword and the page you want to rank so you can compare yourself to your top competitors.

Link Proximity Analysis
Compare a website's link graph to Wikipedia's based on the proximity of their backlinks to other backlinks on the linking page.

Link Depth Analysis
Compare a website's link graph to Wikipedia's based on the average hierarchical depth of the backlink source URLs.

Multiple Links Analysis
Compare a website's link graph to Wikipedia's based on the number of other links to the same domain on the backlink source pages.

Link Hub Finder
Get links from the same sources as your competitors. Find niche linking sites that provide valuable thematic links.

Banned Sites Tool
Utilizing the brand new linkfromdomain: command in MSN, this tool finds the top 100 outbound links on your site and determines whether or not those sites are banned. If they are, it gives you the link to MSN where you can find exactly what pages on your site link to the banned domain!

Get access to all these tools using this link http://www.virante.org/seo-tools

[BlueprintMarketing]

Maybe this will be of help I know that this is a very tough area and honestly I want to help you as much as I can it seems like the information I gave you was stuff that we all know Hildebrand and they strongly profile and Google trust you more yet but if you're still being attacked that probably doesn't help very much right now

Competitors Spamming? Google Says Report Them

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-report-spam-to-us-15187.html

Here are some more tools and discussions that may be able to help you. Google says to report their competitors that are standing you with links I would do that instantly. And I would also try to attribute any cost you incur having to purchase tools in some cases and spend your time fighting off people who are doing malicious things to your website I would like to see your competitor or whoever is doing this pay.

If you catch them please take them to court.

I hope this is of some more help to you I'm sorry that there is no definitive way of blocking this.

http://spamlinks.net/track-report-addresses.htm

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/calling-for-link-spam-reports/

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4585998.htm

Link Hub Finder
Get links from the same sources as your competitors. Find niche linking sites that provide valuable thematic links.

http://www.virante.org/seo-tools

[Dr-Pete]

If they've been removed and disavowed, unfortunately there's not a whole lot you can do but wait on the negative SEO front. Moving forward with positive link-building is important - it sounds like part of the problem is that your link profile may have been in a fairly weak position to begin with.

That said, if the removal was long enough ago, you need to make sure that nothing else is going on, like technical issues (including crawl issues), content quality issues, etc. It's not uncommon for link-related problems to be coupled with other issues (you'd be surprised how many sites have been  hit by both Panda and Penguin, for example). You don't want to end up in a position where you wait 6 months for the link-related issues to go away, and then realize that wasn't the problem at all (or was only part of the problem).

If you've been hit on all three major engines, my gut feeling is that this goes deeper than a one time attack of bad links.

[BlueprintMarketing]

what Dr. Pete just said is right on the money and I would go with his advice.

Respectfully,

Thomas