Why Defensive SEO has to be a part of Everyone’s SEO Plan

January 28, 2014 | Posted by Levi Lewis

Matt Cutts dropped another bombshell into the world of SEO recently. It was meant to be a warning to people who do poor/spammy SEO link building (this time via guest blog posting), but as we’ll discuss here, this recent announcement combined with the Penguin updates in the last year or so has much broader implications for the SEO world.

Matt Cutts' announced that Google is considering a great deal of guest blog posting to be spammy, and therefore possibly a target for future Penguin updates. This is just another example of how Google has declared war on old-school SEO tactics. Unfortunately, as with all wars, this means a lot of innocent civilians will get caught in the cross-fire.

The purpose of this blog post is to first, give you some history behind Google’s updates and secondly, to show you that even the innocent have to change their SEO tactics in order to avoid becoming a casualty of war. Also, I’ll walk you through an easy step by step process on what your defense should look like and how it can protect you.

April 24^th2012: First Shots Fired

Historians and war buffs love to ruminate on the first shot fired in any conflict. These first shots are pivotal moments that oftentimes mark a cascading chain reaction that quickly spills over into official declarations of war. As such, they are powerful moments when everything changed - a sort of point of no return.

On April 24^th 2012, Google fired one of these game changing shots when it announced its first Penguin update. It’s important to understand that Google had previously sought to penalize websites that they believed to be thin, spammy, or of little value. However, the shot fired on April 24^th 2012 had a unique flavor to it. Rather than focus on the content of the website in question, Google now sought to penalize a website for what it believed to be spammy in-bound link campaigns. This, quite simply put, meant that if Google saw a lot of poor links pointing to your site, they might assume that you had been paying for links and ding you in their rankings as a result. This assumption was not without ominous consequences for the innocent.

Penguin Updates and the Emergence of Guerilla Warfare:

Knowing that Google will ding you for poor links, Black Hat SEO firms can get you in Google’s crosshairs by making it appear that you are creating spammy links that point to your website. The fact that either you or a competitor of yours can create poor links to your site creates a guerilla warfare problem for Google. How do they know if you are paying for poor quality inbound links or if another firm is creating them to take you down? Just like in modern warfare, where the enemy fights in the streets in civilian clothes, it’s difficult to differentiate the enemy from a pedestrian, and as a result, a lot of innocent civilians (read: websites) get shot.

A Field Guide for Survival in a Post-Penguin World

With the history lesson out of the way, let’s hit the meat of this post - how everyone’s SEO has to change, even the good guys who only do White Hat SEO. You see, some people believe that if they haven’t been participating in or paying for links to their site, they should be fine. No harm, no foul, right? Well, based on the ground we’ve just covered, it had better be obvious that this thinking is naive, out of date, and flat out wrong. Here’s the bottom line: if you haven’t incorporated defensive measures into your regular SEO tasks, you’re a sitting duck.

Spotting the Enemy

Recognizing the enemy is step number one. Every month, you should have time set aside to spot negative SEO attacks. Fortunately, most are not hard to spot, if you know what to look for, and any company out there that is looking to harm your website’s rankings should stick out like a sore thumb. Taking a look at the links pointing to your site, keep a sharp eye out for any of the following:

A high number of followed links from very low quality websites
Links to your website from link networks (identifiable by the sheer quantity of links on any given page and the spammy appearance of the page/website)
Irrelevant anchor text that points to your site from irrelevant sites
Inappropriate anchor text from inappropriate domains
Etc. (for a more fleshed out list, refer to the section below on Link Detox)

Where can you find these shady links? Google Webmaster tools would seem like a good place to start, but keep in mind that Google Webmaster Tools’ list of inbound links to your site is just a sampling of inbound links. Look to services like Majestic SEO or Moz’s Open Site Explorer for a more exhaustive list of links. These services usually have a much more extensive list that can be orders of magnitude greater that what Google Webmaster Tools shows. (And if you think that Google will show the important ones, so Webmaster Tools is good enough, you can forget it; many people have reported cleaning up all the bad links found in Webmaster Tools only to find that Google was penalizing them for links that Google itself wasn’t listing in WMT).

Your list (tabled in Excel) will look something like this (pulled from a plumbing website that belongs to a client of mine):

Majestic SEO Backlinks

Notice that Majestic SEO, which I’ve used here, lists the source of the link (column A), the anchor text (column B), and other useful information, such as when the link was first found, the trust (authority) of the website that is sending the link, etc.

At first blush, everything appears to be okay. However, simply checking a few items throws up a red flag. Let’s use the sort feature of the Excel table to take a look at the variety of anchor text leading to my client’s site:

Majestic SEO Backlinks Reveal Red Flags

Keep in mind that this particular client is a plumber on the west coast. Having said that, why in the world do they have links pointing to them that use anchor text like "born free” "brad paisley” or "cause of whitney houston death?” And this is barely scraping the surface. I have another client who has links pointing to their website that reference black market items, like knock-off Ugg boots, prescription drugs, and even adult industry products or related searches.

The irrelevance/inappropriateness of the anchor text is your first and biggest clue. A quick visit to the source URL should reveal what is obviously a link farm created for negative SEO purposes.

Targeting the Enemy

Once you’ve spotted the negative SEO, it’s time to weed out the wheat from the tares. Running a manual audit based on anchor text is a good way to start. Keep track of any domains that are linking to your site with irrelevant/inappropriate anchor text. Then, for a more thorough and technical inbound link audit, use a service like Link Detox, which will run a report that will help you evaluate the toxicity of links pointing to your website. Link Detox evaluates links on a number of different criteria, even getting as granular as looking at the C-block of incoming links, registrant names, and other not-so-easy-to-tell-at-first-glance items. A note of caution, however - I’ve used Link Detox, and I’ve found that it sometimes flags relevant links from high PR sites, so don’t take everything at face value; check out the links yourself after the report has been run.

Pulling the Trigger

Once you have your list of domains, Google recommends that you reach out to the webmaster of these domains and ask them to take down the links pointing to your site. Let’s have a brief moment of honesty here. If someone is targeting your website with negative SEO, chances are that the webmaster is going to completely ignore your request. Furthermore, chances are that they are using a hosting service that is overseas and couldn’t care less about your predicament and therefore won’t take any action either. That’s just how Black Hat SEOs do things. However, Google does ask that you take this step and notate it, so contact them it is. Once you’ve contacted them, compile a Disavow list based on the domains you’d like to disavow. I won’t go into minutia on this, as there are plenty of other posts out there that detail how disavow lists are to be created and submitted, but suffice it to say that it will look something like the following, will be saved in a txt format, and will be submitted through Google’s Disavow Tool.

Disavow List Example

Constant Vigilance to Win the Battle

It may not sound like what you want to hear, but I’m not here to deliver good news in time of war. Until Google undoes the situation they’ve created by penalizing spammy inbound links rather than simply ignoring them, you’re going to have to make defensive SEO a part of your daily walk. The silver lining is that once you’ve spotted the negative SEO, a domain based disavow list can help you force your unscrupulous competitor to waste their money by spinning their wheels. By disavowing an entire domain, additional links that are built to your site from these domains will be ignored by Google. Furthermore, because no one can see the disavow list you’ve submitted (or even if you’ve submitted one at all), many Black Hat SEO firms won’t know that each link they build that isn’t from a completely new domain (meaning they haven’t used it to link to you before) is a complete waste of their time, because unbeknownst to them, you’ve already disavowed it.

Conclusion

Hopefully you’re feeling more informed on how Google has brought about the re-vitalization of negative SEO, how your SEO needs to adapt in order to combat it, and exactly what that combat plan looks like. Just like any war, things aren’t settled over night. Buckle down for the long-haul, and you’ll be just fine.

This article was co-authored by Jake Mabey & Levi Lewis

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