Negative SEO and when to use to Dissavow tool?

[Rich_995]

Hi guys

I was hoping someone could help me on a problem that has arisen on the site I look after. This is my first SEO job and I’ve had it about 6 months now. I think I’ve been doing the right things so far building quality links from reputable sites with good DA and working with bloggers to push our products as well as only signing up to directories in our niche. So our backlink profile is very specific with few spammy links.

Over the last week however we have received a huge increase in backlinks which has almost doubled our linking domains total. I’ve checked the links out from webmaster tools and they are mainly directories or webstat websites like the ones below

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siteinfo.org.uk

deperu.com

alestat.com

domaintools.com

detroitwebdirectory.com

ukdata.com

stuffgate.com

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We’ve also just launched a new initiative where we will be producing totally new and good quality content 4-5 times a week and many of these new links are pointing to that page which looks very suspicious to me. Does this look like negative Seo to anyone?

I’ve read a lot about the disavow tool and it seems people’s opinions are split on when to use it so I was wondering if anyone had any advice on whether to use it or not? It’s easy for me to identify what these new links are, yet some of them have decent DA so will they do any harm anyway?

I’ve also checked the referring anchors on Ahrefs and now over 50% of my anchor term cloud are totally unrelated terms to my site and this has happened over the last week which also worries me.

I haven’t seen any negative impact on rankings yet but if this carries on it will destroy my link profile. So would it be wise to disavow all these links as they come through or wait to see if they actually have an impact? It should be obvious to Google that there has been a huge spike in links so then the question is would they be ignored or will I be penalised. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

Richard

[Raydon]

Sounds like someone is messing with you and your site. A shady competitor that is.

Google has said to use the disavow tool like a machete when you do use it. so read up a bit more on the below links and decide whether you should use it or not. I'd probably use it if this is the case of someone screwing around and I can ascertain about that, and I'd do so with extreme prejudice and no mercy on any domain/link I do not want nor had done anything to get anything back from. things that can now potentially throw off my other concerted efforts by diluting the anchor texts and making my link profile utterly spammy. Think C-blocks and IPs too...

Negative results and implications of these links may not YET be visible to you but by the time they are, it may be enough damage to affect your ranking and exposure on SERPs. Depends hugely on who is your nearest competition and what industry it is and how many competitors are out there to get you.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2271695/Disavowing-Links-Google-Says-Use-a-Machete-Not-a-Scalpel

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-disavow-tool-harm-17327.html

"However, if you see a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links point to your site, and you're confident that the links are causing issues for your site, you can use the disavow tool to disavow those links. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."

Good luck

[Rich_995]

Thanks very much for your response.

I’ve identified the vast majority of new links and think I’m going to disavow them. What is interesting is that I checked out 2 of my competitors link profiles and they have also spiked over the last few weeks so we could all be under attack!

[Raydon]

My pleasure Rich_995

be advised that there are a lot of "shady" SEO imposters around the world, for all I can suggest, you should block most countries ips if you do not serve them whatsoever, that is one way to cut em out in general... and it can also reduce chances of getting hacked or having malware and bad code inserted. most such events originate overseas, rule of thumb, block any country ending with ....stan especially! lol old soviet republics are a hotbed for hackers and scamsters.

they can be doing this, only to give you a call in a bit and tell you hey we see lots of bad links and we charge only this much to remove them... believe me, we are a marketing company and some of them are dumb enough to call us and offers us their get to the top of google guaranteed services....

my own rule goes like this: I don't know the link, it looks spammy as hell when i visit it, and it has terribly low PA/DA in general, i will add it to my monthly disavow list, if by the time i go machete playing, it is showing no improvements (sometimes it could be a legitimate link and page, just too new to have any good stats), or if i see more flags of spam, then i whack em right away!

Good luck to you and be careful on whacking links as not any link with low DA/PA is necessarily a bad link, spammy links will have normally one obvious sign: Bad or incomprehensible English (robot written text will always give itself away in 3 lines) , cookie cutter or bad design, and often, not so great of a domain and def no physical address or phone number. blogs excluded ofcourse, gotta make sure what is good what is not. and if you have multiple links from the same domain, and u have assured this is a spammy non-desired place, then disavow the domain entirely.

[Rich_995]

Thanks again for your valuable insight.

It appears the links have slowed down quite considerably now and I’ve read a great deal about the subject of NSEO and it seems in normal cases you can receive thousands of new links almost overnight so it doesn’t look like a major attack in my view. Although my anchor text is now heavily diluted with irrelevant terms which still worries me.

I haven’t disavowed anything yet as my reading hasn’t pointed me to anything conclusive and my rankings still seem to be slowly increasing. When you have disavowed links in the past did you also include a note to Google with an explanation of why you were doing it, as a reconsideration request was not necessary? And do you think that might flag your site up to Google and in a sense hand yourself in even though you are not responsible for the spammy links? I’m just worried (possibly more paranoid) Google will keep a record of the site and monitor it more closely in the future.