Help me to prevent my site from negative SEO
Hi guys,
I'm not sure if here is the right place to post my thread but I'm desperate.
As here most of you are familiar with software that create automatic backlinks I hope to find some help here.
Few months ago my my website started loosing rankings in Google and when I checked on google search console i found that my site was hit by a negative seo campaign - someone blasted few thousand backlinks ( mostly on russian language) with anchors: "forex", "trading"...and so on. I want to point that my site has nothing to do with forex - it is a London based man and van company). Just open ahrefs and check my site and you will see these spam anchors are still there.
Then they just remove these spam links somehow and over 70% of my traffic disappeared. How is that possible?
I have checked all backlinks one by one and added the spam ones in the disavow file but the site doesn't recover - the traffic now is 70% less then before the negative seo campaign.
My question is how can I prevent from such negative seo campaigns and most importantly - how to recover my site?
I'm not sure if here is the right place to post my thread but I'm desperate.
As here most of you are familiar with software that create automatic backlinks I hope to find some help here.
Few months ago my my website started loosing rankings in Google and when I checked on google search console i found that my site was hit by a negative seo campaign - someone blasted few thousand backlinks ( mostly on russian language) with anchors: "forex", "trading"...and so on. I want to point that my site has nothing to do with forex - it is a London based man and van company). Just open ahrefs and check my site and you will see these spam anchors are still there.
Then they just remove these spam links somehow and over 70% of my traffic disappeared. How is that possible?
I have checked all backlinks one by one and added the spam ones in the disavow file but the site doesn't recover - the traffic now is 70% less then before the negative seo campaign.
My question is how can I prevent from such negative seo campaigns and most importantly - how to recover my site?
Comments
Once a a site has enough authority behind it, negative SEO campaigns will have a less and less of an impact in making your site bounce.
How sure are you that it was this campaign that has tanked your site? How long have you waited for a possible recovery? From my experiences, all sites bounce when a lot of links are built to it regardless of the anchors, this is natural, perhaps your site is going through a google dance before it returns back to where it was.. if you are also saying that this negative SEO attack are primarily using anchors that have no relevance to your actual niche, this also indicates to me that it shouldn't effect your rankings for your actual money keywords long term.
Normally, an attack would be primarily using a money sites main anchor term(s), not phrases that have nothing to do with your site, google understands relevance and most likely would not account for back links pointing to your site that come from a completely different niche anyway, this concept helps combat negative SEO.
With that being said, I share @Tim89's skepticism about the impact of these links. I've seen this happen many times, but I've never seen it actually work. Effective negative seo is a lot more complicated than firing up a copy of GSA SER. There have been a couple of big algorithm updates this spring, and I strongly recommend you look into them and see if your drop in traffic corresponds to the date(s) they were rolled out.
Do your dates of traffic falling and those links appearing match up exactly? If not, check out Algoroo to see if it matches up with a google update release.
Good luck OP.
As for negative SEO not working, I have previously entered the dark side after people did it to me and it works well if you're clever about it. Not sure about lately though. I've always been tempted to point some shit anchors at my site to see if Google gives a "boost" to counter any negative SEO effects. EG creating 100s of "porn" anchor links when my sites aren't related to porn.
I decide to 301 redirect the old domain to a new one.
It seems that if the negative campaign is done well - it is almost impossible to recover ( like in my case).
After some more investigation I found that the negative campaign wasn't done with software like GSA SER or Xrumer.
IMO if someone blast a few thousands links to your site Google will just ignore them but my case is different.
The person who made that campaign hacked over a thousand russian websites based on wordpress and placed in content links to my site (with spam anchors not related to my niche).
Then after 1 month he removed all links in a single day and the site started loosing rankings. I still can't believe that Google can tolerate that kind of negative campaigns!
To: JudderMan - I have posted the site here not to get a link but to get some answers.
As you can see I already have redirected the domain to a new one, because was impossible to recover the old one. I have tried everything - disavow bad links in WBT, removed low-quality pages, improved site structure, added fresh content, created high-quality links from authority sites, added social signals and so on...but nothing has helped. I don't want to post more details here, because other people who are doing negative SEO can read the post and can get fresh ideas.
I totally agree that if the domain has strong backlink profile can survive that attack, but what happen to this one? The site had few thousand backlinks (from over 800 domains) - all created manually and over the time. It looks like you need to have much more strong backlinks to survive that kind of attacks.