I've seen 2 case studies this month, one even a public niche site project being big victims of negative SEO. Not sure how else you want me to prove that it indeed does exist. If you really wanna try, pass one of your nicest earning niche site to power users here and let the magic begin.
There are people who to appear taller are ready to chop the heads of other people. If negative SEO does exist, those poor people that do it, don't understand that there are specific consequences to everything you do in life. It is like performing black magic over someone, anyone who do black magic to another person actually it is not aware that the negative consequences are FAR more negative for him than to the person who is trying to hurt. It is called the Universal law of cause and effect or the law of Karma. If you do anything bad to another being you will suffer inevitably the exact negative consequences of what you did sooner or later. There is no way around it. You may not believe it, you may not think of it, but it will happen to you sooner or later.
So if anyone is using anything unethical in his business or his life, hi is actually doing it to himself. Be aware of everything you do, speak or even think. Kind actions and thoughts will bring you success, joy and happiness to the same way that negative actions, bad words or dark thoughts will bring you pain and suffering. So, before you do anything STUPID in your business or life, remember this, think twice, and choose your thoughts and actions wisely. Provide value in your business, be kind to other people and you will inevitably reap success and happiness for yourself and your family.
God Bless you all
Negative SEO with Penguin is very, very easy. Penguin looks at your anchor text profile, and if your exact match keyword anchor text is too high, you will get penalized. Blast a page for "blue widgets" with the anchor text "blue widgets", and it will get penalized sooner or later. The question about how much time it takes is how many links it already has. If the page has a few hundred links, it could go bad in a couple of months. If it has a million links, you would need a ton of servers blasting non stop.
Wow, I'm today a big victim myself of negative SEO. Someone got me penalized for my main anchor term that I just started to rank for 3-4 days back.
Yesterday it was fine. And today someone built a thousand good links to my site making a term go over 40%+ for main anchor. Bitches!
See, bitches like these do exist. Now I gotta working the F out of it again.
I feel like crying lol. It took me 1 and half month for my main term to rank on position 4-7 on 1st page and overnight someone spoiled my game. Likewise on YT, people flag vids.
Its not an easy game.
@ron@gooner Any ideas as to what course of action to set? I immediately executed the below plan:
I removed limits to post per day, set generic anchor text to 100% (meaning not using all my main keywords for the moment) and just hoping to do a blast. I also made tier 1 a bit of a kitchen sink now from contextual as it'd be close to impossible to obtain 1-1.5K contextual links in a day or two.
Fully blown away when I came from college to check to see this massacre happen. I saw my main kw being set on 170+ and I immediately got the scary thought of being the victim of negative SEO and I checked ahrefs and yes, someone made good 1K+ links yesterday with more than 40% of the main anchor text waitage.
Is this course of action correct for now? Would it be able to reverse this penalty? How did Google took a decision so fast in just couple of hours of being the links made? I smell someone also used indexers out there to index those bad links fast.
As for your question 2Take2 I don't think so. I never built so many links. And I checked in ahrefs, there are also low quality porn and profile links. And the anchor text being supercharging at over 40+%. Also there is another variant of anchor text with "mykeyword" and period following it, i.e. if for example my keyword is example1, I am also negatively SEO'd for "example1." (notice period here). That is not something I ever set anchor text for. It is also at around 35%, lol.
I feel like finding that noob and hitting him a punch.
@pratik - I would be tempted to wait a while and see what happens. If you've definitely been penalised then diluting the anchor is a good thing.
I had a few sites that took a hit during the last update and i am trying to recover them, so far no luck. If anything they have dropped a little further recently.
It's a tough one, if we knew exactly how to recover them we would have a million dollar business right there.
Although IMO it sounds like you've been sandboxed, not penalised.
It could still be recoverable though, don't do anything rash, just keep building links to the site at a steady rate and it *should* start to come back after 2 -6 weeks.
Bear in mind that it probably won't move up at all, and then one day it will suddenly climb back up quickly.
Probably best to build another site as well and start ranking it in the mean time, just in case it doesn't work.
In the future, keep your anchor text % really low - like zero. Anchors don't count for much these days anyway. Blasting your site now seems like a good idea to dilute the anchors. Don't use just generic - go with naked URLs as well.
Penguin is algorithmic. No human intervention. When your link profile is out of line, Penguin automatically drops the hammer.
@2Take2 Didn't got much as to what you meant by "sandboxed". I take it as temporary going down and not an actual penalty as of now? Even be it then, but I still got shot down at the end of the day where I started to see a bit good money just 2 days back. I'm as I said earlier, trying to make huge # of links now to dilute it so before Google actually decides to take any permanent judgement, I can try to bring it down by then.
@Satans_Apprentice I have kept 20% naked URLs, would that be a problem? 80% as generic btw.
@pratik - Personally i think you should go for about 50% naked URL. That kind of link is safe and very natural. That's how most people would forward a link right?
@gooner I get it, pretty understandable. Setting so now, thanks a lot.
These idiots causes a lot of pain in the ass. I just had my exams end today and thought like wow, nice, the site has started to rank on page #1 now and I'll enjoy the fruit of it in my whole vacation but I guess not, hardship is what was written for me this time haha.
@2Take2 Haha, tempting advise really. Not sure where should I head. I fear the penalty, even if temporary won't lift until I dilute the anchor text profile. That mofo built around 1.3K links and unless I take another 1.5K links around it with diluting anchors out, nothing will be solved I'm afraid. And if I try 30-35 links/day route, there's another chance that by the time I reach or still far from diluting the anchor text profile, another penguin update would come and swap out my site completely.
So well, this is now just a churn and burn type or experiment project now. That mofo spoiled out my site. Well, it'd be an interesting case study either way lol if I'm able to recover it. Let's see.
Meanwhile, a big thanks to everyone here for valuable advise in bad times like these haha.
@Pratick. Don't dispair. Your not doomed for good. Speaking from personal experience, as soon as enough of the low quality links die and fall out of the index your site will make a gradual return unless you get slapped with a manual penalty. In my case, it took 8 weeks to come back to my original spot. BTW, I had 7,000 forum signature links. Focus on reinforcing the good links pointing at your site to pass more authority for a couple months. This will speed things up.
@2take2 - you can spam as much as you want at any given time and have no worries. just because you build 1k links in an hour doesn't mean google will crawl them in that short time frame. it will still take days and days for this to happen.
@pratik - you keep specifying how many links he built to you. that's impossible for you to know. ahrefs/other seo tools don't pick up even a 1/3 of the total links. ahrefs being the most at around 30%.
Burn the site and start over. What do you think this guy is going to keep doing when he sees that site pop up again or a new one? Same thing.
@JamPackedSpam Maybe. But its interesting, the site has jumped back on Google.com on few locations again to #5. For example on an USA VPS I have on which I checked, its not there, but on HideMyAss google.com through USA IP, its on #5 and also on one of the SERP checkers. Interesting to know it haha.
What would you do maybe if you were in my case? Keep on building links and new sites, i.e. "move on"?
JamPackedSpam - yes, you're quite right, I didn't really articulate that statement very well. Sometimes I forget that people can only read the words that I post on the page, not the rest of the details that remain in my head. )
Anyway, I took his comments to mean that he was going to hammer his site with links for a prolonged period of time, which would almost certainly see him spam himself out of the index.
To what effect have you seen this happen though? I can take a brand new domain today and spam 1500-2k contextuals at it and have no ill effects. What about you?
Comments
Could it be that you have just suddenly had lots of links that you built before suddenly get indexed at once?
Where is your site now in the serps (on which page)?
I had a few sites that took a hit during the last update and i am trying to recover them, so far no luck. If anything they have dropped a little further recently.
It's a tough one, if we knew exactly how to recover them we would have a million dollar business right there.
Although IMO it sounds like you've been sandboxed, not penalised.
It could still be recoverable though, don't do anything rash, just keep building links to the site at a steady rate and it *should* start to come back after 2 -6 weeks.
Bear in mind that it probably won't move up at all, and then one day it will suddenly climb back up quickly.
Probably best to build another site as well and start ranking it in the mean time, just in case it doesn't work.
As I said, build links at a sensible rate of about 20 - 30 per day.
If someone has neg'd you then that's bang out of order!
Anyway, I took his comments to mean that he was going to hammer his site with links for a prolonged period of time, which would almost certainly see him spam himself out of the index.