Negative SEO is possible — here is your irrefutable evidence
Negative SEO (the practice of knocking someone else’s website/page(s) out of search results by pointing spam links at them — Rand from Moz.com) is not only possible, but has been done and here is your proof.
In December of 2014 we noticed something strange when we saw a 78% drop in sales yet a 132% increase in total referring domains & a 197.33% increase in total referring pages to our website starting in October of 2014. After some tedious investigation…here is what we found.
Well this is strange — none of these anchor phrases have any direct correlation with our industry (Yes, we are in the freelance essay writing industry and this post is to provide an honest SEO use case. I ask you to please not get into morals or ethics regarding your personal opinions).
It is unfortunate that we (or should I say Google Webmasters) does not provide historical data for keyword rankings dating back to Oct. 2014 to show impressions, CTR (click through rate), and position. However, we do have personal data.
The data we personally collected: before this backlink explosion, we had a subset of ten keywords ranked in the top 1–3 positions on Google. Once the negative SEO spam took place we dropped to page seven on Google for 8/10 keywords and page five for the final two keywords.
Do we disavow?
We noticed 3 domains (.kr Korean extension) influx 500+ “Links to your site” in Google Webmasters with another 50+ domains from .ru Russia and .info extensions. We do have an SEO strategy but nothing of the sort.
(We disavowed in Jan. 2014 and noticed a decrease in spam domains and referring pages — keywords are back on the rise)
“Tanking a site with a quarter million links from 10K root domains is quite a bit harder than tanking a small business where the industry leader within their niche has 3K links from 400 root domains, where 1/3 of them are old school tactics once acceptable and now damned. In my experience, it’s all about the percentages. The higher the total link legit count, the harder it is to swing the percentage pendulum in the negative direction.” — Rae Hoffman
Essay writing services have become a competitive market where some companies are leveraging not only negative SEO tactics but SEO hacks/injections to gain better rankings on search engines (i.e., Google, Bing, Yahoo).
Here is an example URL from a site that got hit (URL’s are still showing SPAM and redirecting from search results to another essay writing service):
http://www.transmet.com/wp-content/themes/twentythirteen/404.php?q=help%20writing%20my%20paper
This site Transmet dot com (completely unrelated to essay writing services) has a backdoor injection to a Wordpress plugin by SEO spammers to redirect what looks like a 404 page to their root domain.
(I have contacted the website to alert them that their Wordpress website has been compromised due to an injected plugin)
This is one of 1,000's of backdoor injections to hacked Wordpress sites used by the SEO spammers to manipulate their search rankings. I’ve heard throughout my findings that some 20,000 domains have been compromised for this SEO spam tactic.
The fact is there are outfits who can, and are, killing their competitors through malicious link building practices. If you operate within an industry which doesn’t traditionally have websites that have extensive backlink profiles, then it’s going to be fairly straight forward to manipulate the foot print to look unnatural and trigger automatic filters. There are niches that are constantly shaken by negative SEO blasts & SEO spam — we are currently at the heart of one of them.
Now sure, bringing it out into the public and causing such an explosion would force Google to have to deal with it faster, as a greater priority. But that in turn means we suffer it for months, see small businesses ruined, and have to endure several ‘knee-jerk’ Google updates to fix the worst of it, at a cost to maybe 5% of ‘edge cases’.
Its not like we are so stupid as to think Google haven’t seen what we have seen. They *are* aware of the examples we’ve seen, I’m sure. So its not like this isn’t something they are already working on. Its simply that at the moment its a small problem to them, and they are able to work slowly and carefully on it. — Ammon Johns
I published this information to share what I have found being in the industry since 2005. I’d agree with Rand (Moz.com) and I too am hopeful we can give a meaningful push in the right direction and help set Google on a better path for site owners and the web as a whole.
UPDATE:
I did have a chance to explore SEMRush which actually shows the organic traffic drop starting in OCT. and ending around May.
This is quite strange as Google Analytics data does not correlate as shown below. I would think there would be some type of visual data reflection on SEMRush but I see nothing.
I understand this traffic drop could definitely be penguin related (we were aware of the forum spam and that was taken care of over 2 years ago) but that still does not explain the negative SEO still happening on a daily basis and even to our top 2 competitors (with correlated anchor text).
Have a look at the two competitors here:
I agree completely that Google can “differentiate” between spam links and real BL’s with appropriate anchor text. Maybe someone has a better opinion on this use case.
Did you already know about Negative SEO? Have you ever been hit? Would love to hear your experiences in the comments.
