We all know by now that it’s getting easier and easier to get your website penalised or even de-indexed by bad link building practices. Things such as too many keyword rich anchor texts pointing to your domain. Too many of a certain type of link can also get you penalised.

Opportunistic, there are more colourful words being used on the internet, webmasters have taken to building these types of lists to websites that they have no affiliation with. You might wonder why, as this is a bad practice, and it takes time and effort for no gain. But, you see when the penalised site comes back to this “opportunistic” webmaster, there will be a cost for the removal of the links.

Hardly the most ethical way to earn money and it is quite similar to some “customer review” sites out there who host bad reviews that you can pay to remove.

With Negative SEO though, you can win back control from the person who’s building said bad backlinks to your website. Here are some steps to help you:

First of all, find where the backlinks are coming from. Contact the webmaster. A lot. I don’t mean email them once and wait, email them at least once a day and try to get a phone number for them too. Keep in close contact with them until those links have been removed.

If the webmaster is uncooperative, then you need to take this a step further. Get a record of the contact you’ve made with this webmaster, and then you can add their website to a disavow file. Just before you upload the disavow file it might be worth one last try with the webmaster, inform them that it’s in their interest to avoid getting disavowed as Google will remove all worth from the links on their site.

If they don’t care, neither should you. Upload the disavow file with their website on it. There are still debates about the usefulness of the disavow file, but it is in keeping with Google’s recommendations so you shouldn’t fear doing this.

Blog Post by Greg McVey