6 ms·

I'm sorry to say, but the neg SEO didn't drop your rankings, it was to do with the Google algorithm update [1]. Check the screenshot from Ahrefs [2], and your t

by Matsta 6y ago

I'm sorry to say, but the neg SEO didn't drop your rankings, it was to do with the Google algorithm update [1]. Check the screenshot from Ahrefs [2], and your traffic drops on 3rd of December which is when the update went live. [1] https://moz.com/blog/googles-december-2020-core-update https://moz.com/blog/googles-december-2020-core-update [2] https://i.imgur.com/DBkdUEk.png https://i.imgur.com/DBkdUEk.png Google's algorithm is smart enough to recognise Neg SEO attacks. Sure five years ago you could buy a blast of spammy links using Xrumer or GSA with some viagra anchor text and boom you're competition is gone. From a quick glance, most of your pages have pretty thin content, and I assume it's pulling from an API, so none of it is unique. If there was one thing I would do is try to build some content on pages. A great tool to analyse and develop content that is SEO friendly is SurferSEO - highly recommend it. I'm surprised your forum doesn't rank as well as your main site as it looks fairly active. However, I'm not sure about how PunBB does SEO wise.

tyingq 6y ago
"Google's algorithm is smart enough to recognise Neg SEO attacks" This is mysterious to me. That bad links hurt your site unless someone else bought them. Google's smart and all, but?
- Matsta 6y ago
  John Mueller even said himself: https://twitter.com/johnmu/status/913222203071594496 https://twitter.com/johnmu/status/913222203071594496 This is not an isolated thing, negative SEO attacks happen on a daily basis, mostly intention but I bet you there are some accidental ones too. If neg SEO still worked efficiently, then SEO's would be focusing on spamming their competition instead of investing in quality content and backlinks. Like any case, disavow the links if you need, then move on and continue to build content Google likes with quality backlinks.
  - santah 6y ago
    Until recently, Google had a form you could report scraped pages that outranked your original content. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Pw1KVOVRyr4a7ezj_6SHghnX1Y6bp1SOVmy60QjkF0Y/closedform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Pw1KVOVRyr4a7ezj_6SHghnX1Y6... The fact they removed it tells me they're confident enough in their algorithms nowdays, but that doesn't mean they're perfect. I can see my own content being outranked by the scraping domains in this very case. Just google "Streaming Services Availability added to Episodes and Movies" and you'll see. If they can outrank me, I don't see how this will not affect me negatively by my content being considered duplicate ...
    - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
      > The fact they removed it tells me they're confident enough in their algorithms nowdays Ot it could mean something completely different.
santah 6y ago
Hey there and thanks for looking into it. I'm aware of the algo update that happened in December (and that it correlated very closely with my drop in rankings). However, in my experience - even though jumps or drops in ranking are almost always triggered by such updates - there is a good reason for it to happen. But you're right, what is happening here may've also had no effect whatsoever. In any case - I found it because I dug up to try and what was going on and I can't explain what I found in any other way. Even if it didn't affect ranking - does it look like negative SEO to you or do you think something else is going on here?
- hayksaakian 6y ago
  Like the poster above -- I don't think it's negative SEO either. I think it's just an opportunistic person who saw an easy way to rank their own stuff by taking advantage of your hard work Like you said -- they ranked higher in some cases (without doing any work besides copying you).
  - santah 6y ago
    But what are they ranking higher? Only the domains that display the stolen content, with no ads or anything. What is in it for them? It doesn't make much sense to do it other than if you're trying to affect someone else's ranking by causing them to be penalized for duplicate content. No?
    - hayksaakian 6y ago
      if you look through their source code there are ad tags. view-source:https://[redacted].com/titansgrave--the-ashes-of-valkana/season-2 https://[redacted].com/titansgrave--the-ashes-of-valkana/sea... unless you have a competitor you really hates you for some personal vendetta, it's exceptionally rare to see this level of effort for the purpose of negative SEO in 2021. like I said just looks like a spammer going for low hanging fruit, throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks
      - 6y ago
markdown 6y ago
> From a quick glance, most of your pages have pretty thin content, and I assume it's pulling from an API, so none of it is unique. If there was one thing I would do is try to build some content on pages. Your advice will help OP, but it's sad to see it on here. Adding content to sites that don't need it ruins the experience. Don't build for the bot, build for humans. SEO is a cancer on the web. A few days ago Google directed me to a recipe for a particular type of bread. I swear I had to scroll through the authors entire life story... how their grandmother handed down this recipe from her grandmothers mother, how it feels to make you own bread, how to save your sanity with bread, how best to store bread. The recipe at the very bottom of the page could have fit neatly above the fold. Here are two options for OP, either of which will improve his website, unlike your suggestion: https://i.imgur.com/9VlBguW.png https://i.imgur.com/9VlBguW.png
- skunkworker 6y ago
  This 100% with looking for recipes. I understand that they need a lot of "rich content" in order to improve SEO rankings, but when it takes a good 20 seconds to scroll on a phone, past 3 inline ads just to get to the recipe, it's beyond frustrating.
  - jabo 6y ago
    Here's a recipe search site I built not too long ago that shows you just the recipe: https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ https://recipe-search.typesense.org/
- schemathings 6y ago
  My understanding with recipe sites is the copy isn't really for SEO as much as it is to have something you can copyright, because recipes in isolation can't be.
  - markdown 6y ago
    But anyone can still legally copy the recipe (the ingredients and how to combine them) and ignore the superfluous content.
austhrow743 6y ago
>Google's algorithm is smart enough to recognise Neg SEO attacks. Sure five years ago you could buy a blast of spammy links using Xrumer or GSA with some viagra anchor text and boom you're competition is gone. I distinctly remember 8 years ago dealing with negative SEO and reading the same thing everywhere while researching it. "Negative SEO used to work in the olden days of the internet, but now in the modern era Google is all over it." I wonder if in 5 years people will be admitting that negative SEO worked 5 years ago.
- dazc 6y ago
  I had a ten year old site virtually de-indexed as a result of someone plagiarising one single page. It wasn't even an attack as such, just someone being too lazy to at least re-word the article. This was within the last 3 years. Until then, I too believed Google were 'smart enough' to recognise such things.
melomal 6y ago
This is it, and the Jan update and then the end of Jan update too. All of which has wiped a lot of traffic for others out there all with solid sites. Right now getting links indexed is a 15 day+ affair for some, some have no luck at all. From search results that I have been getting, it's almost like nothing makes sense anymore. Pure garbage content is at the top, or worst of all content from 3+ years ago and content freshness is considered a key ranking factor.
santah 6y ago
Btw, forgot to comment on your remark about the forum. The thing is, I have "nofollow"-ed all links to the forum from the main site. Honestly, at this point - I don't even remember why I did it, it must've been close to 10 years ago. Now this makes me think if I should remove those nofollows ...
- Matsta 6y ago
  It's fine to leave them. The people who create these forum profile links will be doing it manually. Whether they're nofollow or dofollow, people will still try to build these links. Nofollow is another thing that isn't important as used to be. Sure dofollow does give you more link juice, but nofollows are still good. If you have 99% dofollow links to your site it's going to look unnatural, so a good mix of dofollow and nofollow always heps.

by Matsta 6y ago

tyingq 6y ago

"Google's algorithm is smart enough to recognise Neg SEO attacks" This is mysterious to me. That bad links hurt your site unless someone else bought them. Google's smart and all, but?

Matsta 6y ago
John Mueller even said himself: https://twitter.com/johnmu/status/913222203071594496 https://twitter.com/johnmu/status/913222203071594496 This is not an isolated thing, negative SEO attacks happen on a daily basis, mostly intention but I bet you there are some accidental ones too. If neg SEO still worked efficiently, then SEO's would be focusing on spamming their competition instead of investing in quality content and backlinks. Like any case, disavow the links if you need, then move on and continue to build content Google likes with quality backlinks.
- santah 6y ago
  Until recently, Google had a form you could report scraped pages that outranked your original content. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Pw1KVOVRyr4a7ezj_6SHghnX1Y6bp1SOVmy60QjkF0Y/closedform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Pw1KVOVRyr4a7ezj_6SHghnX1Y6... The fact they removed it tells me they're confident enough in their algorithms nowdays, but that doesn't mean they're perfect. I can see my own content being outranked by the scraping domains in this very case. Just google "Streaming Services Availability added to Episodes and Movies" and you'll see. If they can outrank me, I don't see how this will not affect me negatively by my content being considered duplicate ...
  - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
    > The fact they removed it tells me they're confident enough in their algorithms nowdays Ot it could mean something completely different.

santah 6y ago

Hey there and thanks for looking into it. I'm aware of the algo update that happened in December (and that it correlated very closely with my drop in rankings). However, in my experience - even though jumps or drops in ranking are almost always triggered by such updates - there is a good reason for it to happen. But you're right, what is happening here may've also had no effect whatsoever. In any case - I found it because I dug up to try and what was going on and I can't explain what I found in any other way. Even if it didn't affect ranking - does it look like negative SEO to you or do you think something else is going on here?

hayksaakian 6y ago
Like the poster above -- I don't think it's negative SEO either. I think it's just an opportunistic person who saw an easy way to rank their own stuff by taking advantage of your hard work Like you said -- they ranked higher in some cases (without doing any work besides copying you).
- santah 6y ago
  But what are they ranking higher? Only the domains that display the stolen content, with no ads or anything. What is in it for them? It doesn't make much sense to do it other than if you're trying to affect someone else's ranking by causing them to be penalized for duplicate content. No?
  - hayksaakian 6y ago
    if you look through their source code there are ad tags. view-source:https://[redacted].com/titansgrave--the-ashes-of-valkana/season-2 https://[redacted].com/titansgrave--the-ashes-of-valkana/sea... unless you have a competitor you really hates you for some personal vendetta, it's exceptionally rare to see this level of effort for the purpose of negative SEO in 2021. like I said just looks like a spammer going for low hanging fruit, throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks
    - 6y ago

markdown 6y ago

> From a quick glance, most of your pages have pretty thin content, and I assume it's pulling from an API, so none of it is unique. If there was one thing I would do is try to build some content on pages. Your advice will help OP, but it's sad to see it on here. Adding content to sites that don't need it ruins the experience. Don't build for the bot, build for humans. SEO is a cancer on the web. A few days ago Google directed me to a recipe for a particular type of bread. I swear I had to scroll through the authors entire life story... how their grandmother handed down this recipe from her grandmothers mother, how it feels to make you own bread, how to save your sanity with bread, how best to store bread. The recipe at the very bottom of the page could have fit neatly above the fold. Here are two options for OP, either of which will improve his website, unlike your suggestion: https://i.imgur.com/9VlBguW.png https://i.imgur.com/9VlBguW.png

skunkworker 6y ago
This 100% with looking for recipes. I understand that they need a lot of "rich content" in order to improve SEO rankings, but when it takes a good 20 seconds to scroll on a phone, past 3 inline ads just to get to the recipe, it's beyond frustrating.
- jabo 6y ago
  Here's a recipe search site I built not too long ago that shows you just the recipe: https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ https://recipe-search.typesense.org/
schemathings 6y ago
My understanding with recipe sites is the copy isn't really for SEO as much as it is to have something you can copyright, because recipes in isolation can't be.
- markdown 6y ago
  But anyone can still legally copy the recipe (the ingredients and how to combine them) and ignore the superfluous content.

austhrow743 6y ago

>Google's algorithm is smart enough to recognise Neg SEO attacks. Sure five years ago you could buy a blast of spammy links using Xrumer or GSA with some viagra anchor text and boom you're competition is gone. I distinctly remember 8 years ago dealing with negative SEO and reading the same thing everywhere while researching it. "Negative SEO used to work in the olden days of the internet, but now in the modern era Google is all over it." I wonder if in 5 years people will be admitting that negative SEO worked 5 years ago.

dazc 6y ago
I had a ten year old site virtually de-indexed as a result of someone plagiarising one single page. It wasn't even an attack as such, just someone being too lazy to at least re-word the article. This was within the last 3 years. Until then, I too believed Google were 'smart enough' to recognise such things.

melomal 6y ago

This is it, and the Jan update and then the end of Jan update too. All of which has wiped a lot of traffic for others out there all with solid sites. Right now getting links indexed is a 15 day+ affair for some, some have no luck at all. From search results that I have been getting, it's almost like nothing makes sense anymore. Pure garbage content is at the top, or worst of all content from 3+ years ago and content freshness is considered a key ranking factor.

santah 6y ago

Btw, forgot to comment on your remark about the forum. The thing is, I have "nofollow"-ed all links to the forum from the main site. Honestly, at this point - I don't even remember why I did it, it must've been close to 10 years ago. Now this makes me think if I should remove those nofollows ...

Matsta 6y ago
It's fine to leave them. The people who create these forum profile links will be doing it manually. Whether they're nofollow or dofollow, people will still try to build these links. Nofollow is another thing that isn't important as used to be. Sure dofollow does give you more link juice, but nofollows are still good. If you have 99% dofollow links to your site it's going to look unnatural, so a good mix of dofollow and nofollow always heps.