Negative SEO is no longer limited to a spiteful competitor targeting ONE website to bring you down in rankings. Lowest scum of the SEO industry has arisen to wipe out the competition completely in one blow.

 

This post is divided into following sections:

• basics of Negative SEO
• “Local.com Negative SEO” Story timeline
• Spammy Directories/Websites
• Proof of Lost traffic for 2 sites as a result of Negative SEO.

• Proof – Local.com connection to their client: CollectionLawyers.com

 

basics of Negative SEO

——————————————————————————————————————-

Negative SEO is creating links to a competitor’s website from spammy directories, porn sites, classified AD sites and other types of sites considered shady/bad by search engines.

is this for real?

screenshot below from a real AD from one of the “vendors” offering to do negative SEO.

 

How do these bad links affect your website?

Search engines algorithm (may) count those bad links against your profile. Some of the bad links may not be counted towards your “profile”, but many would be. If these bad links are taken into consideration by the search engines, the traffic decline or penalty may be sudden OR gradual. If you see your traffic decline steadily in 3-4 months, then its definitely time to check your site’s backlinks data.

Checking your Google Webmaster Tools backlinks data is NOT enough. In our experience they did not give a complete backlinks list for our website.

Negative SEO affects local sites much more than huge brands. Local business sites don’t have that many backlinks so they are much easier to target.

 

Why would someone do it?

Lone competitor: A spiteful competitor may do it to your website if they are pissed off at you for some reason.

an SEO firm: An SEO firm with low or no ethics would do this to be in business. they would pick a “local” physical area to target. they create spammy directories/websites for that Physical area AND industry. this fools the search engines into thinking that these are relevant sites. this does improve your traffic in the short run, but once the search engines figure out these sites to be spammy, your traffic would plummet.

 

 

The “Negative” Story with timeline

——————————————————————————————————————-

We have a client in the Judgment Collection Law industry in the Los Angeles area. Their organic search traffic was on a steep decline for past 3-4 months.

Q1 of 2010 – Local.com acquires Octane360 – a startup SEO firm. see news article on latimes. Octane360 is a startup that automates content creation….(read spammy sites).

 

July 2013 – Local.com registers a bunch of new sites to their already 1000s of owned spammy directory websites. Law firms at target were Collection/Bankruptcy and other law types of law firms in Los Angeles and elsewhere.

 

Sample spammy sites Local.com owns:

• CoronaPersonalInjuryAttorneys.com – GoDaddy Whois
• CoronaBankruptcyAttorneys.net – GoDaddy Whois
• CostaMesaPersonalInjuryAttorneys.net – GoDaddy Whois  and 100s more.

 

 

Here is a Google doc with the first 2000 domains list hosted by Octane360 – there are over 7,000 domains on this ONE IP address as per DomainTools.com reverse lookup.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

August 2013 – Local.com launches these websites with a industry/location specific listing data. Local.com already has listing data divided by industry and physical location.

If you are part of local.com listings, then your listing and data would show up in these spammy websites.

The only exception is IF you hire Local.com to do your SEO marketing then you will not be added to these spammy sites.

 

Spammy link directories/websites

——————————————————————————————————————-

• they are Location specific
• they cover top locations in the US.
• they are also Industry/Niche specific
• Their domain names reflect their location and industry

 

• new sites are created so Google has no history on them.
• relevant names are used to fool Google into thinking they are legit.
• For first 15-20 days, your website traffic may increase because of new links.
• Then after that, Search Engines uncovers similar sites with same exact data and links. That’s when your traffic plummets.

 

• To do negative SEO on local sites, it does not take more than 20-50 bad sites likes these linking back to the competitor’s sites.
• over 10,000 of these similar are on the SAME one IP address. you can easily check this on DomainTools.com
• they are hosted on Octane360 DNS – owned by Local.com
• Many of these spammy directory sites are owned under “gmail.com” email and P.O box address to avoid local.com detection.

 

 

 

Google Webmaster Tools did not show any of the backlinks from Local.com sites.

Proof – Lost Traffic as a result of Negative SEO

——————————————————————————————————————-

Loss of Organic Search Traffic for “Collection Law site 1”

 

Collection Law site 2 – Analytics data

 

 

Proof – Local.com connection to their client: CollectionLawyers.com

——————————————————————————————————————-

Local.com did Negative SEO in Los Angeles area for their client CollectionLawyers.com.

How do I know? 

• a bunch of similar spammy websites are owned by webmaster@CollectionLawyers.com
• why would webmaster @ CollectionLawyers.com own spammy directory websites?
• webmaster @ CollectionLawyers.com owns over 600 domains. I verified that 24 of those spammy sites pointed to my client’s website.

 

George Cohn shown as the owner of this website may not even know that his name is being used by the SEO firm they hired.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

losangelescollectionattorneys.com

• hosted on Octane360 DNS.
• This site looks exactly like all the spammy sites owned by Local.com directly.
• the data per website listing in here is exactly the same as the data on Local.com

 

 

 

 

If you missed it above, here is a Google doc with the first 2000 domains list hosted by Octane360 – there are over 7,000 domains on this ONE IP address as per DomainTools.com reverse lookup.

If you want us to check your domain for possible Negative SEO, Contact Us.

 

Be careful out there!

 

Information provided above are my opinions about the data, its connections to people and companies that I found. You can do your own investigation on these sites and companies and find your own truth.