Negative seo
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Transcript of Negative seo
By Łukasz Kalus
1.Introduction2.How does the problem begin3.What we should do next?4.How to deal with the large amount of
backlinks?5.What to do with our toxic backlinks6.Is it over?7.Summary
By Łukasz Kalus
These are the most important questions that I’ve heard over the last few months. In this little sneak
peek of my article, I will share some popular opinions and real examples I’ve come across recently in my
work, as well as information on how I usually resolve the problem.
By Łukasz Kalus
The first possibility is receiving an email directly from the “spammer” saying that either we make a payment or he will hit us with thousands of spammy links from unique domains pointing directly to our site. Usually, the payment demanded in those emails is around a
couple hundred bucks, but some exceptionally greedy blackmailers have the nerve to ask for over 2
thousands U.S. dollars for not doing negative SEO to our site.
By Łukasz Kalus
The moment we receive a threatening email or figure out that something is wrong with our site, we should
start to closely monitor all of our appearing backlinks. The most basic way to go about this is to check our
most important backlinks in Google Webmaster tools and revive them.
By Łukasz Kalus
If this is not enough for you, and you want to be even more accurate, you can receive a whole lot more data
by using tools like: Link Research Tools, Ahrefs or Majesticseo. Moreover, if you find some patterns or
suspiciously similar footprints, you can use additional tools, like ScrapeBox, to harvest all of the backlinks
pointing to your site at a given moment.
By Łukasz Kalus
If after conducting all of these checks you find hundreds of backlings, you should probably start
worrying about the situation. To avoid time-consuming and errors, I prefer to merge all of the backlinks, de-duplicate them in Scrapebox , upload them to Link Reasearch tools DTOX and start the report. This is a
really fast and convenient way to put all the backlinks in one place and to ensure you have full control over them during the Link Audit. You can even add your
latest disavow files if you have any.
By Łukasz Kalus
After the report is done, we can see our full backlink profile with the many different metrics that have been measured and proceed to check the links. Of course, you can chose other tools to do that, or even just the Seoquake seobar would be helpful.
By Łukasz Kalus
But let’s go back to uploaded links for a moment. We found 2,194 links pointing to our site! For some big
industries that would be normal, but our example is a small/medium business. After sending a quick email to the site owner, I received a reply saying that the that
last time he’d checked his backlinks, he’d only got around two hundred, and that no large-scale link building campaign had taken place since then. So
maybe he’d been doing something wrong?
By Łukasz Kalus
No! After sifting through the first 100 links everything was clear to me. He had been hit by Negative SEO attack.I figured that someone from India was working for the
competition and wanted to hurt my customer’s company. This “blackhat knight” was creating multiple spammy
catalogs pointing to our well-made site.There were so many of them that only about 250 healthy links remained after the link audit. Fifty new natural backlinks definitely do not make up for almost two thousand toxic backlinks.
By Łukasz Kalus
If we prepare a list (in LRT we just need to click on “Google Disavow Links”) containing all of the harmful
backlinks again, we have two different options.The most likely action to be required by Google in
order to lift the penalty is to try to remove all of the bad links pointing to our site. We should use the
disavow tool option, and to do that, we need to have our disavow tool file prepared. It should look
something like picture below.
By Łukasz Kalus
Then, we upload it to the Google Disavow Links Tool
Select the domain that you believe has been attacked, upload it, send it and done! Now none of the toxic backlinks contained in the disavowed file will be taken into account by Google bots.
By Łukasz Kalus
Yes and no. Even though now it looks like everything is fine, just remember that our enemy will still be
constantly working hard to make our life a nightmare. The “spammy” backlinks creator might never stop
working to create new links to our website to try and terrorize us with. It’s good to disavow those links on the
domain level, because if more sitewide backlinks are ever formed, they won’t be counted by Google.
Remember that from now on, you need to focus on checking your backlink profile, and conduct some
Link Audits once a month on average, at least at the beginning . Later, you will be able to figure out how
fast the toxic links are coming in, and when exactly the best moment to review them is.
By Łukasz Kalus
Fighting Negative SEO attacks is not easy work, as it takes quite a bit of time and can at times make you feel like you’re
tilting at windmills. Google is constantly at work trying to keep us safe from Negative SEO actions, but in my opinion,
their algorithm can’t protect us 100% of the time. I didn’t want to focus on all of the aspects of Negative SEO, such as
getting hacked or receiving manual spam action, but rather on my own experiences and real example with
I’ve dealt with. If you have something to add or know other interesting ways to combat Negative SEO, please let
me know.
By Łukasz Kalus
Łukasz focuses mainly on local SEO, specializing in link removal, Google manual penalty recovery and backlink audits. He is constantly searching for ever more modern SEO tools that can make work easier and more effective. Łukasz is also a big fan of extreme sports and multiplayer games.
