Comments on: How a Famous SEO Agency Got Nuked by a Negative SEO Attack & Their Recovery Story

By: Coco

Coco — Mon, 15 Jan 2018 09:25:17 +0000

Sometimes negative SEO can happend just from an technical SEO error, like when by mistake you can have lots of pages with noindex, or an error in the disavow files or similar. 1st is important to take care of SEO before pointing to a competitor of trying to cheat. Prevent this issues is crucial and monitor for fixing as quick as possible too.

By: negative seo

negative seo — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 20:50:53 +0000

So how do we know if any of the techniques made a difference? As Joe mentioned, your ranking for the targeted phrase did not change — so how can you consider this a successful attack?

By: Gale

Gale — Sun, 23 Jul 2017 07:46:26 +0000

Negative SEO can be difficult to recover from and reading stuff like this will be very helpful. Thanks for sharing this important information

By: Publicalog News

Publicalog News — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 12:02:12 +0000

I think that one of this could happend not only from competitor trying to outrank or harm others rankings, sometimes sidebar link from fans can really harm our website.

By: Maulik Patel

Maulik Patel — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 05:11:26 +0000

Dangerous attack. I think this kind of things might be done by jealous competitors. At this kind of situations, backlink analysis tools like CognitiveSEO help a lot. Thanks for sharing your amazing story here.

By: Alexan

Alexan — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 10:59:06 +0000

Yes I agree with Carlo, what about any recovery? Has organic traffic recovered or are you waiting for Penguin 4, still?

By: Carlo

Carlo — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 04:26:27 +0000

I’m an SEO newbie, so I’m confused:

The title of this post included “and their recovery story” but you fail to show any evidence of a recovery; you only showed the steps you took to try to recover.

So how do we know if any of the techniques made a difference? As Joe mentioned, your ranking for the targeted phrase did not change — so how can you consider this a successful attack?

The drop in visibility is site-wide yet the targeted key phrase was unaffected so why would you correlate the two?

By: Joe Williams

Joe Williams — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 18:43:15 +0000

Pretty weird indeed.

I’ve not seen it as a dirty landscape, everyone seems pretty fair which makes it all the more surprising.

Although we did receive this negative SEO threat in August:

http://searchengineland.com/google-responds-mass-negative-seo-extortion-emails-200689

That one got a lot of publicity from SEOs and I gather the sender of the email got identified and backed down.

As I said before, negative SEO isn’t nice at all and I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone.

By: Jonathan Verrall

Jonathan Verrall — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 10:40:42 +0000

Hi Joe,
Haha we’ll take your word for it 😉

You are right in saying that we never actually dropped for the “SEO Training” keywords, this suggests that Google is able to identify an attack on a websites backlink profile.

What is interesting is that we saw the page attract less organic traffic, which indicates we may have lost some of the longer-tailed search to our SEO training page.

We did also notice a drop in performance for other regions of the website which were not targeted with keyword exact match backlinks.

Obviously there are multiple factors at play here, however, the direct correlation to the time of the attack is too clear of a signal to ignore and proposes that the Google search engine considers the health of the backlink profile for the entire domain, (Domain Authority Metrics), when considering the value and importance of specific pages.

You obviously pay close attention to this specific keyword, is this the first time you’ve witnessed dirty play on this landscape?

By: Joe Williams

Joe Williams — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 11:27:57 +0000

I thought I’d comment as I’m probably one of the prime suspects of the attack. I promise, it wasn’t me!

I run the SEO training for Zen Optimise who usually sit just behind Jelly Fish for SEO training in the UK.

Firstly, sorry to hear about the attack. That really sucks and not nice at all.

Secondly, it clearly looks like negative SEO although I’m curious of one thing. As far as I am aware (and I may be wrong), Jelly Fish have been #1 for SEO training (and many related terms) in the UK since (and during) the attack. Is that right? And if so, does that mean that the drop in traffic could be for landing pages other than the negatively targeted seo training page?

Joe