The argument has been made both for and against the existence of negative SEO however, we do have some clues that it exists. Suddenly, its possible to not only do good to your site by building links, but its possible for someone else to damage your SEO efforts by building poor quality links to your site. Negative SEO is essentially where someone intentionally sabotages your SEO efforts to make your site rank lower in Google. So, the chances of the average person dealing with negative SEO are extremely rare. I personally feel like most people will never ever have to deal with negative SEO, but because my blog is so public and because I've been so open about my niche site…I'm much more likely to be attacked negatively by someone. This is obviously one of the big risks that I had to consider when building a public niche site.Īgain, this could be someone that actually thinks they are helping my site however, more likely its coming from someone doing Negative SEO. So, I'm clearly worried that Google is going to start noticing all these links and will no longer feel like a top 10 ranking is warranted for my niche site. Google has made it clear with their Penguin update, that they do not like these types of links that I just explained (from spammy domains all using exact match anchor text). In fact, you can see my link building and anchor text recommendations here. Not good.Īgain, these links are not from me, as I would NEVER recommend anyone using this much anchor text to their site. According to Ahrefs, 86% of the links pointing to my site are using my exact match anchor text. I was ranking in the top 10 already by March 15th, so I only view these links as possibly damaging.Īnd what is perhaps even worse than the sheer number of links, is the fact that ALL of them are using my exact match anchor text (as far as I can tell). Someone obviously decided to suddenly add a bunch of links to my site…and I'm not happy about it! You see, my site was going as planned before these links ever arrived. Notice the large spike in number of referring domains between March 19th or so to March 25th. As you can see from the images below, Ahrefs has found nearly 1,500 backlinks coming from 74 different linking root domains! When I went to Ahrefs, I saw an astonishing large amount of links pointing to my site. Either the person or persons responsible for these links either think they are helping me, or they know that these links could cause damage to my site.įirst, lets take a deeper look at the links pointing to my site. Stuff like this does not normally occur when building a website. My conclusion is obviously that someone reading my blog here is responsible for creating these links. Here is a couple of images of the types of links I am seeing:

The content was all probably auto generated, and other sidebar links were pointing to casinos or other types of sites often associated with spam.Īgain, I want to re-iterate, that I had NOTHING to do with these links! I did not ask for these links and certainly did not want these links. I found 3 or 4 sites that were linking to my niche site using my exact match anchor text…in the sidebar! And these were pretty obvious spammy domains as well. So, I took a look at these domains and all I could do was shake my head. (Things not even close to knife or outdoor related). I looked at my referral traffic and noticed I got a couple of hits from totally unrelated domains. I first noticed odd links pointing to my site when going through my Google Analytics. How Did I Find the Bad or Negative SEO Links? But in my post today, I want to make some educated guesses about where these links are coming from and why they are cause for concern. These are links that I did NOT build or ask for, and I have no idea how they got there.

However, I have recently been noticing some links pointing to my site that are causing me concern. I should be ecstatic, right? Well, I am very happy and hope that the site only continues to improve as I add more content and try to gain the #1 spot in Google.

The site is currently ranking #3 or #4 in Google for its primary keyword and traffic continues to climb for related keywords as well. If you have been following along with my public niche site project, you know that it has started to rank on the first page of Google, and is doing very well.

Negative seo checker