My Website Is Under Attack! Is Negative SEO Real? I Really Need Some Help.
I am reaching out to the community because I am in over my head on this one.
While I am not 100% positive, it appears that my website is under a serious negative SEO attack and it is killing my page ranks and organic search visitors.
Has Anyone Else Experienced This? Do You Have Any Advice To Share?
Before this all started 2 months ago, I was averaging around 350 to 400 daily organic search visitors with a high of $1,750.00 in monthly earnings from being an Amazon Affiliate as well as a few others. Both visitors and income had been increasing on a monthly basis.
As of today, I am down to about 100 daily organic search visitors and my monthly earnings have all but disappeared. All of my highest-ranking pages on Google have dropped like a rock.
I first noticed a problem about two months ago when I realized that I was no longer receiving traffic from Yahoo/Bing searches.
My Site Had Been Added To Their Spam List
After looking deeper, I realized that my site was not showing up anywhere on Yahoo/Bing search engines anymore and was no longer indexed. I confirmed this using the Jaaxy Site Rank tool as well.
After doing a little research, I immediately opened a support ticket with them explaining my situation and asking for assistance.
I received a reply to my ticket four days later stating that my site had been placed under the spam list. They said they would send my request to their product team to see if the block was valid.
Four days after that, they replied saying that after submitting my site to be reviewed the team has decided to lift the block. It would take up to 2-3 weeks for my site to be indexed and visible again.
I was relieved by this message, but unfortunately, I did not receive a reply when I asked what had caused my site to be added to the spam list so I can make sure to avoid this happening again. No worries, I was back and that was all that mattered…or so I thought!
I Assumed This Was The Cause Of My Traffic Decline
The drop in traffic wasn’t drastic at first so I assumed the Bing/Yahoo block was the reason why I was seeing fewer visitors. It was all just a mistake I thought. I knew I had not been doing anything shady. I figured I would have to live with it for 2-3 weeks until I was re-indexed and all would fine again.
Four weeks later, I was still not indexed with Bing/Yahoo and my frustration was building. I sent the ticket owner several more emails but never received a reply.
I also noticed that my traffic was slowly decreasing further every week. That’s when I started looking at my google rankings and noticed they had been dropping as well. All of my top pages had started dropping out of the top 10.
I know the drop in visits is not a seasonal thing because this is the prime season for my niche.
Why I think This Is A Negative SEO Attack
I don’t know for sure but from the things I have read on the subject, the following signs seem to point to it being an attack.
- Over the last two months, I have been receiving a lot of spam type comments to my site, especially to my biggest money page. Many were in different languages and all had spammy links, some even to porn sites. I did not approve any of them and deleted them right away.
- Looking in Google Search Console, it looks like I have received a lot of spammy backlinks over the last two months.
- I have been receiving 20-26 random homepage visits all at once from the several odd looking sources a couple times a week. These sources are:
- earniz-money. info
- we-ping-for-youal. info
- 100dollars-fory-trump-poll. info
- get-clickpy. info
- trafers. com
- prod.uhrs.playmsn. com
If that doesn’t look concerning, I don’t know what does.
Could This Be Something I Inadvertently Did?
I truly don’t believe so. I have never attempted any black hat or spam tactics, never purchased or agreed to any shady link exchanges, never allowed or have done any quest posting and have done my best not to offend anyone. If anything, I have lagged in the outreach and link building department.
I only link to authority sites within my niche when it is appropriate.
I do not have any manual webspam actions against me from Google as far as Search Console is reporting.
All of my posts are well researched and average around 1,800/2,000 plus words long. I check each post with Plagiarism Checker to make sure they are completely unique before publishing.
I 100% believe that I have provided my readers with quality posts that are meant to help them.
Basically, I have followed the training provided at here at WA and avoided all the too good to be true “speed things along” promises that we all see. I have pretty much stayed to myself and focused on creating and writing good content.
What Do I Do From Here?
I am beyond discouraged! I know that Affiliate Marketing works, I know that the training here at WA works, BUT…
If this does turn out to be an outside attack and not something I have accidentally done myself…
If 20 months of learning, hard work and doing things the right way can be brought down this easily, is this truly even worth it anymore?
The excitement of all your blood, sweat and tears finally paying off is an amazing feeling. This, on the other hand, is a devastating blow.
I Could Use Some Help
My site is no longer hosted here at WA as I moved it to another hosting platform about 6 months ago. So I am not sure that opening ticket here at WA would be helpful.
I don’t wish this one anyone, but if it has happened to someone else here, I am hoping you may be able to help me turn this mess around.
If Kyle, Carson or Jay see this, your feedback and advice would greatly be appreciated too.
Thanks in advance to all who took the time to read this.
Patrick
*Bing/Yahoo Update: I finally received a reply yesterday saying that they apologize for the delay in response but the previous employee who had my ticket is no longer with the company and had never actually escalated my case. They would have to submit my site for review again in order to lift the block.
**Bing/Yahoo update #2: I received notice today that they will lift the block but it will take 2/3 weeks before I am re-indexed. At least that is a start, but that does not help me with my Google rankings.
Recent Comments
17
Hi,
I just read about your terrible experience. I do hope that things have been going up for you again and that the problem is solved. Cannot imagine what you are going through. When you make that extra money and you are on your way and suddenly that is gone, I can only imagine how bad that feels and how frustrating that is.
Wish you the best of luck and success. If there is anything I can do for you, please let me know!
Oscar
Hi Oscar. Thanks for the kind words.
After much research, it looks like my issue is related to Google’s early August core algorithm update that is causing my problems. The spam links just so happened to coincide with the update.
I have yet to turn things around, but I am not giving up. I still have several things to try and plan to keep on chugging along.
Thanks again Oscar. I hope things are well with you my friend.
Patrick
Hi Patrick,
I am glad that things are coming around for you. I’m doing well. Although I still don’t have money success, I’ve learned a lot and I know that I will estuvo sround here for a long time. And I know that I will succeed.
Thanks you and good luck my friend,
Oscar
Hey,
If you PM me your site I can take a look.
One thing that will reassure you is that the websites that you linked above as visiting your homepage are not related to spam or negative SEO. These companies perform "Referral Spam" where they get their sites to show up in your Google Analytics so you go and visit them out of curiosity. Everyone gets this kind of spam so that's not an issue.
I can take a look at your backlink profile in Ahrefs and have a look.
I assume you have no manual penalty warning inside Google Search Console?
Hi
I think the best thing you can do now is getting professional help from someone who knows and follows up the IP addresses to find out the source. If your site is not hosted here, you should check that you have the protection against bot and spammers as if you don't have it, means it might happen again.
There are companies or individual out there who do things like this.
Honestly, I would not fool around pay the few bucks and ask someone to fix it. You need to go much deeper into the programming as just lifting bing or google spam ban. Someone dug deep into the coding of your site.
Cheers Sylvia
Hi Sylvia,
I truly appreciate you taking the time to offer your advice. I am researching on finding a professional service that may be able to lend a hand. Hopefully, I can find one that can be trusted.
Thanks again,
Patrick
Hi Marion,
I always appreciate your advice. Thank you for taking the time to offer this help. It means a lot. I have uploaded a disavow file so hopefully, this is a step in the right direction.
Keep up the great work.
All my best,
Patrick
This is deeply disturbing, I wish I could answer you. I will be keeping track of your progress as I am also deeply curious, P.
Now that they have lifted the block, I wish you the best in correcting this with Yahoo/Bing and getting your ranking and searches back up to where they belong.
Hi Kaju,
Thank you for the support, my friend. I have been doing a lot of research and following some advice so hopefully, I can turn this around sooner rather than later.
Wow! That is scary. Wish I could offer insight, but I have none. Definitely interested in following this to see how it turns out, and what can be learned from it.
Thank you for sharing, and I sincerely hope this get fixed for you ASAP.
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I am sorry this happened to you. I just saw your update below. Have you seen any improvements?
Hi Furkan,
I hope things are going well for you. Thanks for the kind words as well.
After doing a ton of research and educating myself, I am still not sure whether my drop in ranks was due to the negative SEO attack, or the results of Googles big update that happened around the same time. It seems like no one really knows.
Everybody has a different opinion, but the majority seem to think that negative SEO just doesn’t work anymore as Google is smart enough to know what is happening and ignore it. I’m not so sure, but it’s impossible to know.
In my case, things have slowly picked back up but I am still not where I was before the rankings drop. Besides keeping my disavow file up to date, I have really been focusing on updating my user experience, site speed, and of course, adding new content. These are the things that I have read that can help if you have been hit by Google's algorithm update.
I believe this has helped somewhat, but I still have work to do. Especially with site speed and internal content flow. I have also been focusing on creating a ton of how to/info articles that I will be posting starting in January. I am hoping this will help increase my authority with Google.
I have big plans to revamp much of my site starting in January that I hope will help make Google like me again. But like I said, it is near impossible to know what they really like as far as I can tell. Good content will win out in the end I believe.
Thanks again my friend,
Patrick
It is good that you somewhat understand what is going on and I wish you the best in these following months and I hope you get the traffic back.