An Example of a Negative SEO Attack Against a Remodeling Website (Oct 17, 2021)

Ok, here is yet another example of a nasty, negative SEO attack perpetuated by cybercriminals from Australia with a recently-launched competing operation in the US.

If you are one of the white hat SEO people drinking the “there is no negative SEO” cool aid or you just don’t believe negative SEO exists (or that it works), then you have probably never encountered a sophisticated negative SEO attack. Well, we are here to tell you that it does work and that unfortunately, it’s very real, thanks Google.

Here are some of the latest examples of toxic, negative SEO backlinks that were built during the last week alone, courtesy of Australian lawyer turned international cybercriminal and a negative SEO virtuoso who is bullying small American businesses while profiting from the US market and other small businesses through a two-sided marketplace in the home energy space these shady individuals (whom we shall not name for now) operate.

So, this lovely assortment of toxic, stealthy, undetectable, cloaked backlinks from this week is the most recent example of what a sophisticated negative SEO attack looks like.

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International SEO Cyber Criminals Strike Again with Negative SEO Attack

If we had a dollar for every toxic backlink we had to disavow over the last several months, we would be some seven figures wealthier by now. 😉 But oh well, this is a tedious and often ungrateful task, as Google can take many months to recrawl low-quality, harmful links in the disavow file.

Anyways, it’s been another week and upon downloading the latest backlinks from Google Search Console (Google let’s you download the latest links every Friday), we discovered thousands of new, stealthy, negative SEO backlinks and hundreds of new, toxic and compromised domains pointing to our websites.

Who is behind this massive negative SEO attack?

As we reported in our detailed post explaining the mechanics of a sophisticated negative SEO attack, the attackers are an Australian company with a large presence in the US market.

As we are currently pursuing an imminent legal action against this company run by what we consider to be cyber-criminals (who pretty much threatened to f**k up our websites if we don’t sell them), we can only reveal that it’s a large company (valued at over $100 Million dollars by EY) run by a narcissist liar and, evidently, a negative SEO virtuoso based out of Australia.

The owner of this arguably shady enterprise, happens to be a former lawyer (go figure) who now engages in what many would describe as cyber crime against US based businesses by copying their website content (through unauthorized rephrasing and rewording of their content, while hardly adding anything unique), but doing so in a way that passes Copyscape and fools Google into thinking the content is original and unique.

What’s more, the primary audience for this Australian owned enterprise is US market. In other words, the profits are made in the US. These profits are then used to steal content from other websites operating in the same space, and for launching negative SEO attacks against the victims who are largely US based websites/online businesses.

As we mentioned earlier, this Australian-owned company has a large US presence, with the US operation being run by a shady character who has recently been promoted to the rank of CEO of the whole US operation, likely as a reward for successfully tricking us into revealing our proprietary business data (under the guise of due diligence to buy our websites). Anyways, this dude now runs their US operation, which is a two-sided online marketplace in the home energy space.

Negative SEO Backlinks Attack Example from October 15th, 2021

But we digress, the goal of this post is to highlight the latest examples of the stealthy, undetectable, negative SEO backlinks that are cloaked (and hence made invisible to commercial backlink tools like SEMRush and HREFs) to show Google one version of the page with external links, while sending web users and commercial backlink tools to completely different pages or websites of questionable nature.

This lovely collection of negative SEO links is yet another example of harmful links being used to attack competitors’ websites. This is only a sample from this week’s negative SEO attack, but there were many thousands of harmful links from toxic domains that were found and reported to us by Google (through Google Search Console) over the course of last week. Imagine sifting through those and keeping your sanity! 🙂

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Negative SEO Attack Report (Oct 8th, 2021): Stealthy, Invisible, Undetectable, Backlinks to Harm a Website

Another week, another SEO spam backlink report. 🙂

Another week has passed and right on cue, we got more negative SEO spam backlinks built to one of our websites during the course of the week. These harmful backlinks are built by a company that boasts that it’s valued at over a $100 Million dollars by Ernst and Young (EY). I think we know how they got their valuation. 😉 As we mentioned in our main on post explaining the new kind of stealthy negative SEO attack that leverages cloaked backlinks that are invisible to tools like SEMRush and AHREFs, these backlinks go undetected by the commercial backlink tools.

However, we know exactly who is doing this — building harmful links our websites. — This company and its founder who is based in Australia, have bullied us into selling our websites for pennies back in 2020 and in 2021, and eventually, after copying and rephrasing/rewording all of our content, they started building harmful backlinks to all of our websites last spring. The only way we can catch most of these backlinks is by using the latest backlinks export from Google Search Console.

Here is the latest sampling of stealthy, invisible backlinks built with automated tools to harm website’s rankings.

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Case Study: Insidious Negative SEO Attack – Examples of “Invisible” Stealthy Backlinks

You are likely here because you are wondering whether negative SEO is real. We are sharing this real world Negative SEO case study because many people including well-seasoned generalist SEO pros are often quick to dismiss the idea of negative SEO as something that doesn’t really work, but unfortunately, negative SEO attacks are very real, as much as we may wish that wasn’t the case.

In fact, crafty negative SEO attacks can be scarily effective in destroying your hard-earned organic search rankings and traffic, thus harming your website’s income streams and/or negatively impacting your business’s ability to gain new customers.

How do you know that negative SEO is real?

Well, just this past summer, Google lunched a major Link SPAM update that took almost a full month to roll out. The websites that had “questionable” link profiles experienced meaningful (and sometime extreme) ranking losses ranging from 20% to 50% loss of traffic. Among other things, this update was gold for negative SEOs who were really able to capitalize on and benefit from Google penalizing the websites to which they built toxic links.

It’s true that many amateurish negative SEO attacks may fail to deliver the “results” the attacker is looking for, but well-planned negative SEO campaigns executed with precision, consistency, and venom, can have strikingly dark consequences for the victim.

In this post, we document the learnings from a wide-spread and ongoing negative SEO attack that targeted several different websites during roughly the same timeframe (approximately 6 months as of the date of this post) to various degrees. It was clear the attacker was the same entity, as all targeted websites that experienced the negative SEO attack were targeted with the same kind of backlink spam with harmful backlinks originating from similar sources and having very similar pattern due to identical methods being employed by the attacker.

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