Do you know what a link bomb is? If you’re not entirely sure, or have never experienced it, keep reading. After all, negative SEO is a very real problem so you should be aware of what it is, how to prevent it from happening to you, and what you should do if you are a victim.
What is negative SEO?
Negative SEO is a tactic used to damage all the optimization work that you’ve put into improving your website’s organic search results and traffic. It involves using shady tactics such as link farms and hacking your website to sabotage the criteria that Google looks for when they rank your site.
Your site ends up being penalized by Google as they are unaware that you are not responsible for this, and your search rankings and general site profile is damaged as a result.
Trendhim, a Danish start-up of men accessories, has experienced it and today Sara Lopez, marketing manager in Trendhim, shares their experience with us.
Before the attack
Before August 2016, or rather, before the attack, we had 34,000 visits in the sunglasses category, (which was the category affected by the link bombs). After the attack, we had 7. We held the top positions in Google in terms of accessories and jewelry for men, until August 2016.
For many months, Google thought we were a pornography page. Until we solved it, or at least managed to stop it, we lost more than 70,000 Danish crowns (or 9500 euros).
Solving the problem and going down in Google
Friday afternoon, like every week, it was time to check our weekly analytics. The CTR seems to be fine, the number of weekly visits remains constant, but the number of sales has however decreased a bit compared to previous weeks. We thought there wasn’t a particular explanation for this decrease, but just in case, we reviewed our backlinks. To our surprise, two factors caught our attention:
- The number of Trendhim’s backlinks had increased to a great extent. And although this can sometimes be a good sign, in this case the links did not come from quality pages, but from fraudulent pages.
- The anchor text governing our profile was no longer Trendhim, it was porn. Only 9% of our links were related to Trendhim.
Our profile had been massively attacked by more than 8500 links, which made Google believe that our page was pornographic. The accessories we sell may be sexy, but they are far from being pornographic content.
Figure 1 – Some of the spam links
In the past, profile behind our backlinks did not matter, nor did the anchor text, but in the recent years Google has dedicated itself to improving his algorithm, imposing quality measures to determine if a website is really relevant for the users.
One of the ways to find if a site is relevant for the users is to use the anchor text of the external links, as a relevance indicator. If, for example, Trendhim has as its main anchor text “jewelry for men,” Google will know that it is a jewelry company for men. But in the same way, if the anchor text is no longer relevant to the web, and happens to be porn, Google will think that Trendhim is a pornographic website.
“We have a lower ranking on Google, which makes it harder to get customers,” says Mikkel Ussing-Kelstrup, who controls traffic in Trendhim.dk.
Solution
Once the problem was detected, there are 4 things you should do:
- Add all the unwanted links to a reject list: Then send the list to Google through Google Search Console. (If you haven’t added your page to the Search Console, it would be a good idea to do so.)
- Ask for a manual review: Write to Google through a contact form and demand a manual review.
- Contact websites: Contact those responsible for the websites and ask them to remove the links.
- Reinforce your profile: Boost your positive links by encouraging beneficial links from others.
We played against time, Christmas was approaching and with it the best sales season of the year, and our page did not stop being damaged. We lost 99.9% of visits on the sunglasses page (the page where most of the links were linking to).
Contacting the owners of the websites was successful, in some cases, but not in all. Most of the websites were false foreign pages, which people use to harm others.
We also try to take legal measures, contacting our insurance company and the police, with no luck.
It seems that your insurance does not cover these types of online attacks, so, although we could be talking about the life or death of our business, insurance could not do anything about it.
Our next option was the police, we tried to explain what happened, we even tried to show them our link profile, but unfortunately the attack was not something we could report, they did not know what crime we were talking about. No one except us could help us.
After the attack
After all, we managed to keep most of the damage within a single category, sunglasses, which fortunately was not our strong point.
The first month after the attack, luck knocked on our door and Google updated its Penguin Algorithm, focusing more on the links.
Three months after the attack, as a gift sent from heaven (or Mountain View – Google headquarters in California) our rankings were, more or less, back to normal.
The damage was minimal because we sent a list to Google with all the unwanted links and Google Penguin was updated in our favor. But today, a year after the attack, this is still our profile:
Although strong, rest of the attack remain in our profile. We have managed to duplicate the percentage of links directed to Trendhim, but the anchor text: porn, still takes 13%. As a result of contacting the different fraudulent websites, we have managed to eliminate most of the links, but 67 of them are still there, hurting us.
About the Author: Sara Lopez is a University student living and studying Computer Science in Denmark. She works as a marketing manager for Trendhim. In her free time she works as a copywriter, as well as writing a personal diary: sara-lopez.com. You can connect with Sara through Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.