New Surge of Inbound Links, Negative SEO attack?

animalstyle

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Over the past couple weeks, I've seen an influx of total crap inbound links to my niche site. I saw a ranking dip, then return over the past week.

My best guess is it was these links hitting my boat and rocking things, but nothing else I've actively done would have caused this. I haven't been actively building or have ever built this type of crap in the past.

Info:
  • New link rate has jumped up double or triple in the last month. The influx has been in the last couple weeks.
  • Lots of .info, .ru, .in domains
  • The links are mainly of 3 types:
    • image gallery links which are linking directly to images crawled from my site.
    • top website list links.
    • keyword list links.
Could this be a negative SEO attempt, or just getting added to some crazy crawlers that are constantly indexing the site?

Either way - I've been meaning to start a disavow file, but haven't. This is the type of stuff I'd want to add to that file, correct?
 
It's auto-generated non-sense from image searches, Alexa lists, domain registry lists, etc. I disavow all of it, nofollow or not, rather than sort it out. I do this monthly around the 1st by checking all of the incoming links from the past month. Many end up dropping off by the time you find them, and many don't. I just add them all. By doing this consistently I've not seen any damage.
 
@Ryuzaki Have you seen, or have evidence that its helping? Or is it all about preventative maintenance?
 
Thank you - very helpful stuff. If I see some interesting movements after scraping the crap out of my link profile, I'll report back.
 
Yeah agree just try disavow any you find. I get a ton of spammy image links, and links on the bottom of random spun articles that seem to add a few google results to every page on these blogs. I just disavow every couple of weeks.
 
Are they scraper sites with autogen nonsense? I've been seeing more and more scrapers pop up a lot lately, that are grabbing the title and spinning the description... Not sure if they're even that harmful, as I'd imagine any non technical person wouldn't have a clue what this shit is. Surely, Mr G has to account for that somehow. I've never done anything about these links and have been just fine. (but perhaps I'm missing out on some goodness? Who knows)
 
@chanilla I'm not seeing scrapers that are grabbing site content, no. They are scraping images and linking to those images tho.

I just went through and reviewed a list of ~400 domains and disavowed about 40 domains. Will report back if this has a positive effect.
 
I used to worry about these kind of sites but don't bother now. I think once your site hits a certain level of traffic then you get added to these auto-generated/scraper content lists and it happens. I am positive Google knows and understands.
 
@Darth
I agree with you, I haven't worried about this historically. My project is 3+ yrs old, built totally white hat, with a fairly strong link profile to match.

Based on the data I have, this recent 3x surge in crap links coming my way did seem to shake the rankings. I saw a noticeable dip in rankings and traffic. Maybe it was just coincidence, maybe not.

I don't think my project specifically is unshakeable, maybe what you're referring to is a much larger boat that I am currently sailing. I think there is validity in both cases, it comes down to keeping a finger on the pulse, I'd say.
 
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