Negative SEO on the increase.

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Valentina Huff: Does anyone have a tip for getting rid of thousands of spammy backlinks that a competitor created for a site? We tried a reconsideration request but it was rejected by Google. We do not want to contact all the sites and ask for removal b/c there are thousands of them and time is of the essence. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
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  Ryan Cramer: If you had the option for reconsideration, there are more issues than just spammy links. I recommend using the disavow tool in GWT. There is usually a 3 month waiting period for this to process through.
  Then focus on other SEO strategies to improve the value of the website.
  Note Google's Disavow statement : "If you believe your site's ranking is being harmed by low-quality links you do not control, you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site. You should still make every effort to clean up unnatural links pointing to your site. Simply disavowing them isn't enough"
  
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  Jim Munro: HI Valentina. Please send me a copy of the penalty notice and also triple-check with the site owner that there can be no other source for the negative links other than a malicious competitor. I will share this information with the panel.
  
  +Ryan Cramer ;is correct to point out Google's Disavow statement but Google's history of dealing with negative seo has been a litany of lies papered on more lies. Google did not not allow for innocent victims. It was bad policy formulation at best. It's gone wrong and appears to be getting worse as time goes on.
  
  Please send me all that you can. If it's genuine I think this would make a useful case study, but it's vitally important to know that the injury is not self-inflicted. If he/she has bought links, we will find out about it.
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  Ryan Cramer: +Jim Munro, I had dealt with this about a year ago. Google's "justification" for the disavow delay was so amateur webmasters didn't accidentally remove links. You and I remember the days that placement based on links was more of a popularity contest than valuable, relevant results. I think you'd agree that Google has come a long way since then. Personally, I've never put too much stock in linking, and instead focused on quality content and strategic coding with great success. 
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  Jim Munro: All good, Ryan, but I do not think Google deserves to be defended on their handling of Negative SEO from the beginning until today. We'll have to agree to disagree, mate. :)
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  Ryan Cramer: Trust me, +Jim Munro ;, I have no sympathy for Google's inept handling of this issue.  ;I just wanted +Valentina Huff ;to be aware that a delay may be inevitable, and considering that a "reconsideration request" does not become available solely on bad backlinks, that non-linking aspects of SEO should be evaluated while waiting out link removal requests and the disavow process.
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  Marty Eigner: If you want to speed up the disavow tool process make sure the URL's are crawled by GoogleBot after you submit the file. The reason it takes so long is because these spammy links are crawled so infrequently.
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  Valentina Huff: Thank you all so much, I appreciate all the feedback. I've never seen something like this happen and I can assure you this is a very bizarre case. This is a website that does very well, brings in thousands and thousands of web visitors monthly, and you can see in Search Console how there are now 14,000+ backlinks linking to the website and they're all spammy. I am just shocked how someone can spam a website and then Google can knock it off just like that, without even an explanation that this was not us, it was a competitor. Doesn't seem just to me.
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  Valentina Huff: +Jim Munro ;the error said "Unnatural links to your site Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. These may be the result of buying links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes." There are about 5,000 spammy links now that were not there before, AND the website went from #1 #2 in Google to now somewhere on page 8 or 9. And when you type in the name it won't even come up but further down the page in Google. It took a huge dip in traffic. This does not seem fair at all. How can a competitor do this and get away with it and have there be no way to have immediate action taken on Google's part?
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  Richard Brus: Here's the fastest two step process Valentina.
  
  Step 1) Run your domain through link detox (http://www.linkdetox.com/) to easily find all of your toxic links. They have the most advanced toxic link algorithm I've used and they get it right 95% of the time. This will save you a ton of time finding the actual harmful links and will also automatically create a disavow file for you.
  
  Step 2) Use a service called rmoov (https://www.rmoov.com/index.php) to automatically contact all of the webmasters that control the sites your bad links are on to have them removed.
  
  Let the rmoov service run for a couple of weeks , then submit your disavow file, and then submit another reconsideration request. Good luck
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  Valentina Huff: Thank you so much +Richard Brus ;!!!! Very appreciative
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  Suraj Gadage: +Valentina Huff Lately I have worked with several clients (getting 100K to 1M monthly visits) who have been penalized by Google for unnatural link building. Speaking from experience, penalty revocation is a challenging task to deal with. I went through the entire conversation and below are the facts, though they're a bitter pill to swallow.
  
  1. You must have time and patience to get your client out of the penalty. For one of our clients it took us one and a half year and four reconsideration email attempt to prove Google that we are innocent
  
  2. Disavow Tool is not the complete solution for you to get out of the penalty. Besides, you need to be using this tool wisely because it can harm site's performance
  
  3. Tools like Link Detox or Congentive SEO are good for letting you know the extent of the problem that exists and types of spammy websites linking to you. I would not completely rely on the tools findings. Instead, I would still manually go ahead and look at the backlinks.
  
  4. Email Outreach for link removal and link correction is required for you to prove Google that you did take a lot of efforts to clean up your client link profile. This is crucial for getting your reconsideration request accepted
  
  5. Even after penalty gets revoked, there is no specific timeline defined for improvement or getting back to the original site performance. One of our client penalty was revoked last year, but we are not even close to the original performance
  
  Looking at your comment it appears that you don't have time for manually cleaning up the link profile. Have you considered outsourcing this task? 
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  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this week's SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:16:35 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/negative_seo_on_the_increase +Valentina Huff
  
  If our assistance with this issue was useful to you, please consider sharing your success story so that others might benefit.
   ; ;