If you honestly believe you have been a victim of Negative SEO then here are some checks you can make to see if it’s true. Obviously, it’s good SEO practice to make these checks anyway. We do on a monthly basis.

Negative off-page SEO

This type of negative SEO will target your website externally. I.e. without actually accessing your website. There are few of main ways that someone can do this. Today we are focussing on links.

A few spammy links won’t hurt your websites rankings. However, a large number of these links will harm your rankings. Typically they will be websites with poor domain authority and most of the links will have exactly the same anchor text. Such as linking to your website with a specific phrase: Amazing SEO Services for example. It would be fine to have a few links to your website with a specific phrase but to have hundreds would obviously be suspicious.

Traffic

If you see a sudden drop in traffic to your website then something has obviously gone wrong. That is of course if it’s not seasonal. For example: A company that sells Christmas Trees should expect to see a drop in traffic in January.

Here you can also, see what will happen to the traffic once you fix the problem.

Backlinks

The start of the attack should also mirror the number of links you have linking to your website. If you see a boost, like the one below. Then there is probably something wrong…

How to fix it

Fixing these issues is quite straightforward but time consuming. The first action is to generate a list of your current links. This can be done using a few tools such as Moz Link Explorer, Majestic SEO and Google Console. We find that it’s best to use all three of these tools and compile a definitive list.

The next stage is to work through all of these links and decide which ones are good links and which ones are poor links. We said it will take time…

Once you have this list, you can separate the good links from the bad ones. Where possible you should then work on removing the bad links. This is done in a variety of ways, everything from contacting the website owners to removing them manually from accounts such as directories.

The last stage is to make a list of the links that you couldn’t remove and submit them to Googles Disavow tools. You need a Google Console account for this.

Feel free to contact us with any questions, or if you want us to look into this for you:

Jon Seymour: jon@janklin.com – 01492 460 460