Recover From a Negative SEO Attack

印个历史 · 发表于 2014-4-30 22:34:43

How to Identify, Disavow and Recover From a Negative SEO AttackBy [color=rgb(55, 120, 168) !important]ROHIT PALIT on April 30, 2014 - In [color=rgb(55, 120, 168) !important]Tips & Insights

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This post is by Rohit Palit. The author's views are entirely his or her own, and don't necessarily represent the views of Ahrefs.

Many of you have already heard of ‘Negative SEO’. While it’s something most webmasters won’t ever face, it still bothers a fair amount of you, especially webmasters of popular or reputable websites in a particular field. If you think your website is being punished by Google and other search engines for all the wrong reasons, it might be a good time to inspect your site’s link profile to see if there’s any sort of negative SEO action going underground against your site.

Identifying a Negative SEO Attack

This part isn’t as complicated as the heading may sound to you. In fact, Ahrefs (and not even a paid subscription is necessary) is all that you’ll need to know if your site is affected by negative SEO. All you need to do is to put the URL of your site in Ahrefs and inspect a few things about its link profile:

Take a look at the anchors cloud for your site and see if you can spot one or multiple unusual or even spammy anchors. Spammy anchors like “cheap viagra” are used abundantly by negative SEO practicioners.
If you have a paid Ahrefs subscription, take a look at the top referring domains and visit a few of them manually to see if you can spot one or two among them which aren’t really meant to be linking to your site. For example, spammy sites, blogs that are part of private blog networks, etc. Anything that looks artificial should be of concern to you.
Take a look at the dofollow-nofollow distribution stats. If the percentage seems unusual to you, dive deep into the link profile searching for bad sites linking to yours. Usually, I believe anything between 50-85% dofollow is within the safe limits , depending on the industry or niche.
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These are some of the easy ways you can identify a negative SEO attack. Sure your site has been hit by a negative SEO attack? Move on to the next part.

Recovering from a Negative SEO Attack

You can recover from a negative SEO attack in two different ways:

Getting the harmful links removed or the pages containing them taken down.
Creating a text file listing all the domains/pages containing links with which you don’t want to associate your site and submitting it in Google’s Webmaster Tools under the ‘disavow links’ option.
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The former is achievable in case of small-scale, unintentional negative SEO. Because, if someone knowingly negative SEO’d your site, sure as hell they won’t pull the harmful links if you tell them to. So, the only option left for you would be to disavow the harmful links either in a domain-wide basis or a URL-by-URL basis. I prefer the former because it’s really uncommon for someone to think a single link from a otherwise good domain as harmful.

Disavowing Bad Links & Domains

If you’ve previously used Ahrefs to identify a negative SEO attack on your site, and it’s not that widespread, you can manually list the harmful domains and put them in a text file in this format:

domain:www.site1.com
domain:www.site2.com
domain:www.site3.com

Remember to put a ‘domain:’ prefix to the domain names to domain-level disavow the site. Also, list only one domain per line.

However, if the attack was widespread, and you think you can’t just go around manually identifying and listing out the bad domains for hours, you can use tools like LinkDetox that’ll help you with the process, but remember that nothing works better than a human brain in identifying a truly bad domain. It’s not uncommon to see such tools false reporting even legitimate domains. So, I guess use with care should be the message, and you should look at automatic tools only when the situation is too intense and you’d rather want to lose the positive signals from a few legitimate sites than to see negative signals from a few thousand bad sites harming your site’s organic search performance badly.

Monitoring Results

It takes time before you start seeing positive results from a disavow report to Google. It’s evident from Matt Cutts’ webmaster videos that Google actually needs to re-crawl the sites whose links are bothering your site before those links are ignored. It can take anywhere between a few weeks to a few months before you see any visible result.

However, there’s a way you can speed up this process of Google re-crawling those sites. You can try a link indexing service such as Link Pipeline or other alternatives to get those pages crawled faster by Google, thus speeding up your own site’s recovery. While it shouldn’t really matter whether you just aim to get the main site recrawled or the page(s) containing the links to your site, I wouldn’t really go with the former because it’s apparently less fail-proof than the latter option.

Hopefully, if you do everything right, your site will come out of a penalty in time and withstand a negative SEO attack just fine. If you have any questions at all, drop a comment below.

http://blog.ahrefs.com/identify-disavow-recover-negative-seo-attack/

congqoo · 发表于 2014-9-7 19:43:49

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