Negative SEO, Disavowing Links, Keyword Difficulty & Traffic

[becool]

I have a couple of questions for you, if you don’t mind.

1. I have read here and elsewhere that negative SEO should not impact a site nowadays in that Google’s algorithm accounts for it and disregards it. If that is the case, why do PBNs negatively impact a site? Is it a matter of degree such that negative SEO is so egregiously negative/spammy that Google knows it cannot be the work of the site owner/webmaster given the backdrop of an otherwise kosher backlink profile?

2. What are your thoughts on preemptively and gradually disavowing backlinks from blogs that have no traffic that are high domain authority that appear to be PBN-esque in a scenario where no penalty has been rendered? Specifically, assuming you are faced with a situation where you have many non-PBN-esque or otherwise spammy links, but a couple dozen PBN-esque links (and the competition has many PBN-esque links). Can you safely avoid disavowing the PBN-esque links and simply proceed to earn safe/non-questionable links so as to dilute the less-than-stellar links (on a site that is beginning to rank but you are interested in keeping as a long-term investment)?

3. Do AHREFs’ keyword difficulty estimations account for domain age, in your experience (as opposed to what AHREFs may or may not suggest)? I have read comments here suggesting that the tool’s estimations are reliable, yet I have found instances where it doesn’t necessarily account for domain age (and, more specifically, the heightened age of the competition as compared to my site).

4. Is a high domain authority link from an aged blog with a low spam score (Moz) with no traffic and a mish-mash of topics (from post to post) and many outgoing links (but topical relevance with respect to the content within which your link is placed) likely to be a poor link (assuming the content is well-written and there aren’t any discernible references to adult, pharma, gambling niches)? How important is incoming traffic in the scheme of things? Is the lack of traffic a deal breaker or nearly a deal breaker?

5. What's a good tool for investigating a site's tiered (second, third, fourth, etc.) links in a streamlined fashion? I don't think AHREFs can do this, short of pulling a site's backlinks and then searching for the backlinks to a particular backlink manually.

6. What’s your favorite Disney movie? I like the one with the chef and the mouse, but I don't know that it's a Disney film.

I really am sorry for the redundancy. I have forty-two more questions. I have spent countless hours researching this stuff so my questions aren’t the result of being lazy. Please humor me.

 

[CCarter]

I have read here and elsewhere that negative SEO should not impact a site nowadays in that Google’s algorithm accounts for it and disregards it. If that is the case, why do PBNs negatively impact a site? Is it a matter of degree such that negative SEO is so egregiously negative/spammy that Google knows it cannot be the work of the site owner/webmaster given the backdrop of an otherwise kosher backlink profile?

Negative SEO CAN impact a site, it's why some people here regularly disavow links on a monthly basis. I've never read on here that negative SEO cannot impact a website. If I can tank my own site why wouldn't I be able to tank my competitors with the same off-page tactics?

There are a lot of people outside BuSo that write blog posts but aren't really in the trenches of SEO. They think it's not possible too, but I can tell you that I've watched the SERPs daily, for the last 4+ years by simply being the admin of SERPWoo and negative SEO is real and happens A LOT, especially in very profitable niches (Amazon vendors know exactly what I'm talking about - talk to them and see if they've agree that "negative seo doesn't exist").

And definitely don't take my word for it, but use the logic about being able to tank your own site, continuing that thought you should see it's possible to tank someone else's site.

Perhaps those bloggers are writing propaganda for the SEO community so it deters blackhats from even thinking about negative SEOing a website. If enough bloggers say "it cannot be done", then it would deter a would be negative SEO campaign from even attempting it. Some altruistic endeavor I guess. Spreading lies never works though, the truth always surfaces and in SEO the truth surfaces from watching the Google results and seeing website tank for "no apparent reason" - until you look at the backlink structure...

I have forty-two more questions.

Ask as many questions as you want, it's what we're here for.

 

[Ryuzaki]

1. I have read here and elsewhere that negative SEO should not impact a site nowadays in that Google’s algorithm accounts for it and disregards it. If that is the case, why do PBNs negatively impact a site? Is it a matter of degree such that negative SEO is so egregiously negative/spammy that Google knows it cannot be the work of the site owner/webmaster given the backdrop of an otherwise kosher backlink profile?

This is a fun one. Anybody who tells you Negative SEO isn't possible isn't an experienced SEO by any means. There are a few questions you can ask that can't be answered from the position of "it doesn't exist."

• If Google has a complete handle on Negative SEO, then why does the Disavow Tool exist?
• If Negative SEO doesn't work, then why does the Pure Spam manual penalty exist?
• How come all of the mass spam black hats get algorithmic Penguin penalties that make it impossible to rank instead of simply failing to rank until they use better links?
• How does Google know to penalize you for spamming your own site but knows not to penalize someone else's site when you spam them?

The classic answer to why some sites don't seem to be affected by this problem is because they're huge, old, legitimate national and global brands, have authority, and have trust. Walmart.com can absorb a ton of spam. This reasoning is what led to people buying really nice links that pass a lot of juice, trust, and authority, before hammering their site with spam.

The answer here is that it's not about what Google can detect. It's about what they're willing to ignore. And it always boils down to a different set of rules for the big guys than the little guys.

2. What are your thoughts on preemptively and gradually disavowing backlinks from blogs that have no traffic that are high domain authority that appear to be PBN-esque in a scenario where no penalty has been rendered?

I do a monthly disavow session by reviewing my backlinks from Ahrefs. Speaking of Negative SEO, I resurrected a friend's site that was 100% legitimate but got caught up in one of those web 2.0 image scraper bots. Tons of links directly to his images, to the .jpg and .png files, not pages. And his entire site got penalized for it. Guess what fixed it? Disavowing in bulk all those domains.

In this set of questions you keep using the phrase "PBN-esque" but that doesn't really mean anything. Either it's a PBN site or not. A site can be high authority with little traffic for two reasons: they don't do any on-page SEO or they have a penalty. You can determine if it's a penalty by looking at their traffic history (SEMRush makes this easy). If it tanks all of the sudden and never comes back, then it's probably a penalty or a redesign where they dropped all of their optimized pages or the domain, and someone else started using it and retained the homepage links and nothing else (didn't do the work to retain all the ranking power).

But no, if a site doesn't have a penalty and it links to me, I want the link. I'll even take links from sites with penalties if they come naturally. They won't pass on the poison, they're just doomed for their own rankings. But I don't want a link from a site that's actually a part of a PBN. All PBN's come to an end and take a lot of victims with them.

3. Do AHREFs’ keyword difficulty estimations account for domain age, in your experience (as opposed to what AHREFs may or may not suggest)?

Ahref's suggests a lot of things about their metric, but it's my opinion that if they do account for things like domain age, index size, etc., they're weighted so lightly in the algorithm for keyword difficulty that they may as well not be there. It's a decent metric if you accept it as one that only looks at links (and not even the power of the links).

Sometimes it's wildly inaccurate, sometimes it's on the dot. You can't let metrics do all of the work for you though, you have to get into the SERPs and check things out with human eyes. If you're working in bulk at mass scale these metrics are life savers to help you filter, if you can accept the fact that you're going to cut some great keywords and include some horrible ones in the process thanks to the inaccuracy.

4. Is a high domain authority link from an aged blog with a low spam score (Moz) with no traffic and a mish-mash of topics (from post to post) and many outgoing links (but topical relevance with respect to the content within which your link is placed) likely to be a poor link (assuming the content is well-written and there aren’t any discernible references to adult, pharma, gambling niches)? How important is incoming traffic in the scheme of things? Is the lack of traffic a deal breaker or nearly a deal breaker?

You're putting so many parameters in these questions! The "high authority but no traffic" part, I dealt with that above. They either don't do on-page or they're penalized. The rest sounds like a news site. Yes, getting a link with sitewide topical relevancy for your niche is a great ranking booster. Second best is page relevancy, where it's an article on your topic on a general site. Both are fantastic.

Forgetting the part about high authority, remember that most pages on the internet, if not most domains, have zero external backlinks pointing at them. They make up the majority of the link graph and generate all of the page rank juice that then flows around elsewhere. It's okay if a site doesn't get traffic due to lack of authority, in terms of getting a link from them.

Traffic flow is not a deal breaker. But it's a huge deal enhancer. Getting traffic is definitely in some weird way a part of the ranking algorithm for your domain-at-large. If you've ever had a new site that gets 5 to 10 organic search visitors a day suddenly get a link that passes 200,000 visitors in 24 hours, trickle off to 50,000 the next 24 hours, and then go to zero after that (like hitting #1 on the front page of Reddit or getting shared like mad on Facebook), then you'd see the effects of traffic on rankings.

Yeah, it's hard to say the one backlink or the bunch of shares and likes aren't playing a role, but suddenly all of the traffic from the virality is gone and yet you're sitting at a new plateau of traffic. Now you're getting 100 visitors a day, because across your whole site you saw a lift in rankings. I'd say it's because traffic is a validator. Even if you aren't using Google Analytics and shoving the fact down their throats, Google is tracking everyone on the internet damn near ubiquitously. They know, and it lends a lot of validation to your site being a worthy one of ranking, it seems.

5. What's a good tool for investigating a site's tiered (second, third, fourth, etc.) links in a streamlined fashion? I don't think AHREFs can do this

Ahrefs can do this but it's pretty clunky. When you're looking at a domain and it shows a T1 (tier one) link pointing in, there is an icon there you can open in a new tab that then pulls up the links pointing to that specific page. You can identify the T2's this way and so forth, if there aren't a ton of them (or maybe it's mass spam) and assuming Ahrefs has crawled them in the first place.

In my opinion, from having played with the math, knowing that the page rank algorithm dampens the juice it passes by 20-25% per link jump, it's not even worth creating T3 and T4 links. The only reason I'd mess with T2 is not to pass juice but to dial in relevancy with specific anchor texts. But I don't mess with spam at all these days.

6. What’s your favorite Disney movie?

Classically I liked Aladdin and The Lion King. Beauty & the Beast was always a good one too (the new live action was great). That more recent one, The Princess & the Frog I think it was called, was great in the classic style. I'm not a big fan of the new Pixar stuff, but Frozen was fantastic too.

 

[turbin3]

It's just too bad this isn't an option in the Disavow Tool:

tld:ru
tld:cn
tld:pl

Or whatever TLDs you don't have any business getting links from. LOL

As far as not existing, my response to them would be, "What's your website?" Let's see what pointing some SAPE links at their homepage does after a few weeks...

The thing to think about here is the tech behind all of this. It's not magic. It's programs. Ultimately it's algorithms and thresholds.

As a programmer, how would you build a system to handle this link quality factor for the entire internet? For one, you'd probably want to lean towards the side of averages and detecting "normal" behavior. Some of that's easy once you put some math behind it.

Then you'd want to look for outliers and handle those. It's easier to detect things that stand out significantly. Now start to think about types of links or linking behavior that might stand out significantly from the crowd. Russian SAPE links? That's potentially an easy and obvious one. Spammy directory links? Most sites have those, so in most cases, maybe not such a big deal.

 

[becool]

Negative SEO CAN impact a site, it's why some people here regularly disavow links on a monthly basis. I've never read on here that negative SEO cannot impact a website. If I can tank my own site why wouldn't I be able to tank my competitors with the same off-page tactics?

There are a lot of people outside BuSo that write blog posts but aren't really in the trenches of SEO. They think it's not possible too, but I can tell you that I've watched the SERPs daily, for the last 4+ years by simply being the admin of SERPWoo and negative SEO is real and happens A LOT, especially in very profitable niches (Amazon vendors know exactly what I'm talking about - talk to them and see if they've agree that "negative seo doesn't exist").

And definitely don't take my word for it, but use the logic about being able to tank your own site, continuing that thought you should see it's possible to tank someone else's site.

Perhaps those bloggers are writing propaganda for the SEO community so it deters blackhats from even thinking about negative SEOing a website. If enough bloggers say "it cannot be done", then it would deter a would be negative SEO campaign from even attempting it. Some altruistic endeavor I guess. Spreading lies never works though, the truth always surfaces and in SEO the truth surfaces from watching the Google results and seeing website tank for "no apparent reason" - until you look at the backlink structure...



Ask as many questions as you want, it's what we're here for.

Thanks for responding. I can appreciate the logic that you're applying here. There's a great deal of misinformation that exists regarding SEO and it makes sense that those who suggest negative SEO isn't real are poorly informed or simply lying or, potentially, a combination thereof.

This is a fun one. Anybody who tells you Negative SEO isn't possible isn't an experienced SEO by any means. There are a few questions you can ask that can't be answered from the position of "it doesn't exist."

• If Google has a complete handle on Negative SEO, then why does the Disavow Tool exist?
• If Negative SEO doesn't work, then why does the Pure Spam manual penalty exist?
• How come all of the mass spam black hats get algorithmic Penguin penalties that make it impossible to rank instead of simply failing to rank until they use better links?
• How does Google know to penalize you for spamming your own site but knows not to penalize someone else's site when you spam them?

The classic answer to why some sites don't seem to be affected by this problem is because they're huge, old, legitimate national and global brands, have authority, and have trust. Walmart.com can absorb a ton of spam. This reasoning is what led to people buying really nice links that pass a lot of juice, trust, and authority, before hammering their site with spam.

The answer here is that it's not about what Google can detect. It's about what they're willing to ignore. And it always boils down to a different set of rules for the big guys than the little guys.



I do a monthly disavow session by reviewing my backlinks from Ahrefs. Speaking of Negative SEO, I resurrected a friend's site that was 100% legitimate but got caught up in one of those web 2.0 image scraper bots. Tons of links directly to his images, to the .jpg and .png files, not pages. And his entire site got penalized for it. Guess what fixed it? Disavowing in bulk all those domains.

In this set of questions you keep using the phrase "PBN-esque" but that doesn't really mean anything. Either it's a PBN site or not. A site can be high authority with little traffic for two reasons: they don't do any on-page SEO or they have a penalty. You can determine if it's a penalty by looking at their traffic history (SEMRush makes this easy). If it tanks all of the sudden and never comes back, then it's probably a penalty or a redesign where they dropped all of their optimized pages or the domain, and someone else started using it and retained the homepage links and nothing else (didn't do the work to retain all the ranking power).

But no, if a site doesn't have a penalty and it links to me, I want the link. I'll even take links from sites with penalties if they come naturally. They won't pass on the poison, they're just doomed for their own rankings. But I don't want a link from a site that's actually a part of a PBN. All PBN's come to an end and take a lot of victims with them.



Ahref's suggests a lot of things about their metric, but it's my opinion that if they do account for things like domain age, index size, etc., they're weighted so lightly in the algorithm for keyword difficulty that they may as well not be there. It's a decent metric if you accept it as one that only looks at links (and not even the power of the links).

Sometimes it's wildly inaccurate, sometimes it's on the dot. You can't let metrics do all of the work for you though, you have to get into the SERPs and check things out with human eyes. If you're working in bulk at mass scale these metrics are life savers to help you filter, if you can accept the fact that you're going to cut some great keywords and include some horrible ones in the process thanks to the inaccuracy.



You're putting so many parameters in these questions! The "high authority but no traffic" part, I dealt with that above. They either don't do on-page or they're penalized. The rest sounds like a news site. Yes, getting a link with sitewide topical relevancy for your niche is a great ranking booster. Second best is page relevancy, where it's an article on your topic on a general site. Both are fantastic.

Forgetting the part about high authority, remember that most pages on the internet, if not most domains, have zero external backlinks pointing at them. They make up the majority of the link graph and generate all of the page rank juice that then flows around elsewhere. It's okay if a site doesn't get traffic due to lack of authority, in terms of getting a link from them.

Traffic flow is not a deal breaker. But it's a huge deal enhancer. Getting traffic is definitely in some weird way a part of the ranking algorithm for your domain-at-large. If you've ever had a new site that gets 5 to 10 organic search visitors a day suddenly get a link that passes 200,000 visitors in 24 hours, trickle off to 50,000 the next 24 hours, and then go to zero after that (like hitting #1 on the front page of Reddit or getting shared like mad on Facebook), then you'd see the effects of traffic on rankings.

Yeah, it's hard to say the one backlink or the bunch of shares and likes aren't playing a role, but suddenly all of the traffic from the virality is gone and yet you're sitting at a new plateau of traffic. Now you're getting 100 visitors a day, because across your whole site you saw a lift in rankings. I'd say it's because traffic is a validator. Even if you aren't using Google Analytics and shoving the fact down their throats, Google is tracking everyone on the internet damn near ubiquitously. They know, and it lends a lot of validation to your site being a worthy one of ranking, it seems.



Ahrefs can do this but it's pretty clunky. When you're looking at a domain and it shows a T1 (tier one) link pointing in, there is an icon there you can open in a new tab that then pulls up the links pointing to that specific page. You can identify the T2's this way and so forth, if there aren't a ton of them (or maybe it's mass spam) and assuming Ahrefs has crawled them in the first place.

In my opinion, from having played with the math, knowing that the page rank algorithm dampens the juice it passes by 20-25% per link jump, it's not even worth creating T3 and T4 links. The only reason I'd mess with T2 is not to pass juice but to dial in relevancy with specific anchor texts. But I don't mess with spam at all these days.



Classically I liked Aladdin and The Lion King. Beauty & the Beast was always a good one too (the new live action was great). That more recent one, The Princess & the Frog I think it was called, was great in the classic style. I'm not a big fan of the new Pixar stuff, but Frozen was fantastic too.

Your response is really informative and has given me a lot to consider/re-consider. I think you pointed out one of my limitations relative to my use of the term "PBN-esque" and that's probably because I have a specific example in mind of a link (or, better yet, a set of links) and I cannot discern whether they're PBNs or are simply links from blogs that are selling links that don't seem to have a PBN footprint (or, at least one that I've been able to find).

I think what I really need is an SEO who is willing to consult and answer some of my questions using specific examples of links I have. I can't find anyone who is willing to (i) consult, (ii) not bullshit me to death and (iii) knows what they're talking about. If any of you do this, for pay, please let me know (but if that's against the forum rules, please don't).

It's just too bad this isn't an option in the Disavow Tool:

tld:ru
tld:cn
tld:pl

Or whatever TLDs you don't have any business getting links from. LOL

As far as not existing, my response to them would be, "What's your website?" Let's see what pointing some SAPE links at their homepage does after a few weeks...

The thing to think about here is the tech behind all of this. It's not magic. It's programs. Ultimately it's algorithms and thresholds.

As a programmer, how would you build a system to handle this link quality factor for the entire internet? For one, you'd probably want to lean towards the side of averages and detecting "normal" behavior. Some of that's easy once you put some math behind it.

Then you'd want to look for outliers and handle those. It's easier to detect things that stand out significantly. Now start to think about types of links or linking behavior that might stand out significantly from the crowd. Russian SAPE links? That's potentially an easy and obvious one. Spammy directory links? Most sites have those, so in most cases, maybe not such a big deal.

I really didn't think of things from this vantage and probably wouldn't have had you not pointed it out. Ultimately, I agree with the conclusion you and others are making relative to negative SEO (although this particular line of reasoning/thinking didn't occur to me until you mentioned it). Thanks

 

[becool]

Another couple of questions, if you don’t mind, regarding external links to authoritative sites. Can you please clarify whether linking out to external sites from your money site is in fact a best practice? I understand it’s a practice that is largely adhered to with respect to guest posts on other sites (i.e. sites other than the site you are attempting to earn/build links to). Does the concept/benefit extend to a money site?

Also, does the answer above depend on whether we're talking specifically about a money page as opposed to a blog post or other page that links to your money page?

Additionally, is it a best or good practice to include external links to authoritative sites followed by interlinking to your power/money pages? I’m referring specifically to the order (i.e. authoritative external links followed by your own interlinking to a money page).

My understanding is that it’s a good practice to include external links to authoritative sites followed by a subsequent (interlink) link to another page on your site but I am concerned that I’m extending a guest blog post concept to my money site.

Thank you again.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Can you please clarify whether linking out to external sites from your money site is in fact a best practice?

Take a read of this: Hilltop Algorithm. This is the fundamental method Google used and still uses to rank content. But realize how much things have changed since then too. PageRank altered that algorithm. Then they added a lot more ranking factors and eventually side-algorithms processed offline and rolled into the main one. And on and on.

What you can take from that link is that Google identifies webpages as Experts and Authorities [and 99.99% nobodies that don't matter]. The basic interpretation is that Authorities receive a lot of links from Experts who give a lot of links. Back in the day the game was "I want to be an Authority to rank high."

But Google now classifies their queries as certain types. Sometimes they would rather rank the Experts than the Authorities. There's other types of webpage classifications and query classifications. Some are "review content" and some are "ecommerce content" and some are "research document" ones, etc. You can figure them out by searching the term you're going after and then the only chance you have of ranking is to model your content on the classification that Google is ranking currently. I've had SERPs get re-classified out from under me too though. You never know.

So my point is that linking out is definitely a part of the algorithm. Sometimes you see pages and sites dominating that never link out but receive a ton of links, and sometimes you find pages with tons of links out but weak backlink profiles. You need to see what Google is preferring already by searching the term you want to rank for and looking.

But to take it back to a more generalized discussion, yes, it is commonly accepted that linking out from your pages is a positive ranking signal because it helps Google understand your relevancy and it doesn't create a black hole for their spiders. The pages you choose to link to and the anchor text you use to do so not only help them but also help you. You can get strategic by never linking to specific competitors or to their money pages.

Also, does the answer above depend on whether we're talking specifically about a money page as opposed to a blog post or other page that links to your money page?

I'd refer you to the above discussion, specifically where I'm talking about "checking the SERPs and seeing what Google is preferring or tolerating in the top 10." The mystery might unravel if you include backlink profile information site-wide and page specific.

But at the end of the day, you'll see pages ranking with or without external links. You'll rank them yourself that way if you try too. I think there's a lot to be said for being a part of the web and being in a node of the link graph for your niche and vertical. That means not only getting links but giving them too.

​

Think about how Google would organize sites into clusters like this. They use links, content and words within it, and it's all to establish a page and site's place in a vertical, niche, sub-niche, etc. How can you help manipulate that without breaking the rules to reinforce yourself as part of a certain cluster? That's the answer in the form of a question.

Additionally, is it a best or good practice to include external links to authoritative sites followed by interlinking to your power/money pages?

It doesn't matter that much. Just realize that PageRank is split between the links in your content. Some goes out of the sidebar and footer links and main navigation, but the bulk of it seems to go out through links in the main content.

You can get the benefit of linking to other sites and still preserve most of your PageRank by linking to yourself a few times too. I always interlink. Every single post has at least one internal link to another post on my site, if not several. That's how you get all of your boats rising with the tide of link juice. And it's how you stop yourself from bleeding all your juice out to your competitors.

The specific order doesn't matter that much. I think it's settled fact that the first links are deemed more important. If you link to the same page more than once, only the first anchor text is counted, for instance. But in general, this isn't something I'd stress about. If you wanted some off the cuff guidance, I'd say link to yourself first. If you link to yourself 4 times, just stick the external link somewhere in between or at the bottom.

Really you should just let the content itself guide you on the order. It's not critical.

 

[Samwise89]

I'm real analytical like you, @becool, I want to know the atomic structure of every detail. The problem with SEO is Google's algorithm is a black box. You can never know what's inside. You can only feed it data and see what pops out the other end, and usually months later. And there's so many random variables, it's impossible to know the details.

But we can get broad, round about ideas about what works. That's all you need. The rest is putting in the work.

The cure for me from analysis paralysis thinking was to get started and rank a page. Then two, then have a whole project do good. For me, that was $100 a month. Once you do that, you can start to see the big picture. You can't see the big picture when you're zoomed into the parts, looking at the shape of the brush strokes.

I'd sum the entire game up like this: find a keyword with 500-2000 search volume (or smaller if you're the type to have 100's of pages), put it in the slug, title tag, H1, H2, use it a few times in the post elsewhere, put it in an alt tag. And if you write the post well, you'll use enough similar phrases to cover relevancy. Then get links to the page and if they come from relevant pages that's even better. Rinse and repeat forever.

It's boring as hell and being a college student, I expect there to be deep mysteries to unravel, but there's not. You'd think because it's computers and algorithms and engineers and coding that there'd be more to it, but there isn't. You pump out the content and get links to it and never stop. Market it like a real marketer too. Eventually Google trusts your site and you start making money.