Negative SEO ?

[helloworld]

So just looking through one of my clients links and notice they suddenly have a tonne of anchor based links for "electrician melbourne" all created in late June and July.

Should I be worried? I never build these kind of links. I asked the client if he created the links which he denies.

Any thoughts on where these may be coming from ? Effects? I noticed we dropped from 3rd page to 4th over night, which could be natural. Either way I'm getting nervous.

 

[James]

I had a client in the US have a negative attack to 2 URL's, basically they sent 25k spam links to two urls. The thing is they did the same thing too every one in the niche and Google clearly did not take any action.

What we did to ensure nothing happens in the future was 410 the two urls which were hit and disavow the root level urls where the spam cam from.

It seemed to work becuase this was 1 year ago and nothing has happened for this query and we still rank on page one.

If the spam is to the home page it can be a bit more tricky you can always disavow, I would monitor other ranks in the keywords too if other sites have been hit it can be an indication their is a pattern and not to worry too much.

 

[petermeadit]

helloworld,just wondering is the anchor text "electrician melbourne" unrelated to your clients site? If your client is indeed a "electrician melbourne" then it might not be malicious, it could just be a backlink that has gone a bit viral, like through a blog network or something.

 

[helloworld]

Thanks for your feedback guys.

Yeah it was targeting the home page, James. Which initially had me concerned. But I think Peter might actually be on point with his comments. Weird that it did go viral but I guess I can't complain?