How to Figure Out Who Is Neg SEOing You

If you’ve ever been neg SEO’d then you know how infuriating of a feeling it can be. Depending on your portfolio of sites, many have felt the wrath of this chicken shit tactic of building spam links to your competitors. Most find out that they’ve been scared for nothing as rankings typically remain unchanged from the attack.

In the past I pointed out a specific example of a live site that my friend Robert was running that I watched get obliterated over some $20 a day coupon SERP.

At the time neg SEO was a hot topic and people were debating if it was even possible. I tried presenting the case to Rand Fishkin but he discounted it, saying it wasn’t a controlled case. That’s total bullshit though, there couldn’t be a more perfect example of neg SEO working in my mind. The domain was under a year old, it had just enough natural links to be pulling rank, then someone fired pure spam anchors with the text “porn movie” and dropped it like a rock. Since I was helping Robert with the site, I watched every new link it got up until the blast of spam. Maybe if I took a polygraph test Rand would believe me.

Sure this case showed it working but overall I will say don’t waste your time with it. As you can imagine when this became more popular I ran a variety of my own tests. I’ve even run some real cases on my forum where I purchased some highly spammed domains and 301’d them to a competitor along with some other fun stuff. But overall we concluded that our time is better served pushing up rankings instead of trying to drive them down.

That brings us back to the purpose of this post, attempting to track down the little scumbag who neg SEO’d you. Unfortunately I don’t have some secret method for uncovering who submitted those GSA comments. Sure we can try to dig into those links some, but I’d take more of an investigative approach.

Typically one thing that can’t be argued, whoever neg’d you has an interest in those top rankings. So it is very likely that they have a site ranking in the top 10 and it’s not going to to have a bunch of spam links pointing at it. Simple right? Just see who isn’t getting spammed and it’s definitely them! Of course it’s not that easy…

Also think back and see if you made anyone mad who knows how to spam. Once I told a certain SEO troll on twitter that he was basically the “Catfish of SEO” and surprise surprise my blog got spammed with that exact anchor. I wonder who spammed me haha, not to worry though since this person is so hated that at least 5+ people decided to take time out their day and spam him 100x harder.

What about IP addresses, maybe a trace left upon submission? Well not so easy, it would be really nice if you knew their IP address and saw it on a guestbook submission. Unfortunately any jackass knows to pick up some proxies when running this, so finding the origin IP is unlikely.

Should you fire back at who you think is responsible? Tempting for sure, I’ve fired back on principle many times. But the way things are working now days, I won’t waste my time with it usually. So if anything, maybe this post will dissuade some people from even starting a neg blast in the first place.

You want bigger muscles? Go to the gym and work out, don’t think about how you can break the guy’s leg who is bigger than you.

Hey neg SEOers, you’re like the Tonya Hardings of SEO.