I’m hoping someone here can help me out with this situation… Our site had been ranking really well, top 1-4 for a while, but recently we dropped to pages 2 or 3. After some digging, we found that three domains with really spammy links were redirected to ours.
I’ve done a lot of research and I’m almost certain that this is the issue (I know there’s a competitor in our field who plays dirty to rank higher). I’ve checked through our server logs and found the offending domains, but now I’m stuck… what do we do?
Here’s what I’m thinking:
Should we block requests from the referring domains?
We’ve already disavowed the domain, but should we disavow all links pointing to the abusive domain?
Haven’t heard of this happening in a while, thought the SEO Wild West days were over.
Do you know when you got the spam links? Can you see the timing between the links showing up and your rankings dropping? It could help figure things out.
But yeah, disavowing is probably your best bet here.
@Scarlet
The drop in rankings happened the same day (or the next day) after we found the redirected domains, and according to Ahrefs, the referring domain count went up by 330%, from 1k to 3.3k. Our traffic hasn’t recovered and is now on a steady decline (58% down from pre-attack). It’s been happening for a few weeks now.
@Rowen
That’s crazy… sorry you’re going through this. When did you disavow them? From what I know, it can take a while for things to show up in Google’s eyes.
Scarlet said: @Rowen
That’s crazy… sorry you’re going through this. When did you disavow them? From what I know, it can take a while for things to show up in Google’s eyes.
We disavowed a few weeks ago, so it’ll probably take some time. Thanks for the support .
@J.cole2
This is basically our plan, so it’s reassuring to know we’re on the right track. We’re not 100% sure we’ve disavowed every spammy backlink going to the redirected domains, so we’ll double-check that.
Maybe you could have a lawyer send a letter to their hosting provider to ask them to remove it, unless they’re hosted on a server that’s hard to contact, like a Russian one.
Jason said:
Maybe you could have a lawyer send a letter to their hosting provider to ask them to remove it, unless they’re hosted on a server that’s hard to contact, like a Russian one.
Not a bad idea. At least we could contact the registrar. Thanks for the suggestion .
Keep an eye on Google Search Console for any new suspicious links and update your disavow file accordingly. Google’s algorithm has improved at detecting negative SEO attacks, but it’s still a time-consuming process.