Negative seo problem

[otsinguturundus]

Hello,

Someone attacked our website with negative SEO and our website fell drastically.

If i use bing webmaster tools link explorer i see dozens and dozens spam links but if open a link i don't find this link in that website. Is it possible that someone added the links and then remove thouse links when we got hit?

Or is it possible to hide the links that they don't show up on webpage but they are still there?

How can i use Google disavow links tool if there is no links in thouse websites but Bing link explorer shows spam domains pointing to our website.

BR,

T

[KarlBantleman]

can you post an example of the links that webmaster tools is showing?

Have you checked in the source code of the website? It might be in white text or something. If you have a well built, well optimised website with a range of good links, negative SEO doesn't normally work. Google is very good at knowing when to not count a link and I'd just concentrate on building more good links because this will negate any effect that negative SEO would have on your website.

[David-Kley]

What message did you get that says this is what happened?

View the source code of the linked page(s) in question. Most likely you will see it listed there. Use the disavow tool to get rid of them, and also try reporting the page in question to Google as spam-related. Chances are you are not the only url affected if they are hiding links in code, and you could potentially get that linking domian penalized if it's participating in bad practices such as "link hiding".

"bing webmaster tools link explorer"

Meh. Use the MOZ open site explorer or majestic seo link checker to get another overview. One thing you don't want to do is jump to conclusions, and get all panicked over something like this. Get organized, list out the linking domains in question, and take action. Could be possible that one of the directories you signed up for listed you in other places you were not aware of. Happens all the time. Sign up for a questionable link directory or citation, and soon enough, lots of mystery inbound links appear.

[MarieHaynes]

Are you absolutely sure that those links are what caused your rankings to drop?  When did the drop happen?  There was a big Panda update around May 20 that caused a lot of sites to increase or decrease in rankings and that is all about on-page content as opposed to links.

Google is generally very good at simply discounting the links that come with negative SEO.  One of my own sites was hacked recently and had thousands of links pointing to it with anchors like "ugg boots" and "michael kors".  Those links showed up in ahrefs and majestic but not in Webmaster Tools.  The links did not affect my rankings.  I am pretty sure that the reason why they didn't appear in GWT is because Google was able to recognize it as an attack and just discount them.  Still, just to be sure I collected the links from ahrefs and majestic and disavowed them.

I have still yet to see a credible case of negative SEO working on a site unless that site already had a really unnatural link profile to start with.