Your virtual detox

So, Christmas is over for another year and lots of people’s attention will have turned to their January detox. No coffee, no alcohol and lots of exercise!

While you’re at it why not detox your virtual life as well. We’re talking about the potentially toxic side of your backlink portfolio. Don’t worry we don't mean the links we achieve for you. Our links are built using link exposure and are totally white hat.

Greens for your website! Managing the toxicity of
your off-site is becoming very important.

There are however a couple of reasons as to why it is worth taking a look at your backlink portfolio. Firstly, you may have undertaken some old fashioned link building previously which may now be counting against you. Secondly, you may have been attacked more recently by a negative SEO campaign.

While site owners can do certain things from an SEO standpoint to get their sites to rank higher, there are also things like building low quality inbound links or engaging in other forms of search engine spam that can harm their rankings.

But what if it wasn’t you?

It could’ve been your competitors, black hat SEOs or spammers who have used negative SEO techniques to bring down your site in the rankings. In fact, black hat forums are filled with stories from people who have succeeded using this technique. All these spammers do is place 1000’s of spammy backlinks on low quality sites.


Since the latest penguin update link quality has become
vitially important, both historically and ongoing.

Another technique we've seen are negative SEOs buying 1000’s of likes and follows for your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Google is now looking at Facebook and Titter accounts that gain likes and follows very quickly. They wont penalize you for the gain but if they then see the like and follow count decrease this is a sign that you fraudulently bought these likes and follows and it will count against you.

As a client of Click Submit what are we doing to fend against this threat?

We introduced a product (at no additional cost) about 3 months ago called the “negative SEO alert system”. This system simply monitors the following:

- A rapid increase in your backlinks total.
- A rapid increase or decrease in your Facebook likes.
- A rapid increase or decrease in your Twitter followers.

If we detect an abnormal pattern then our system will alert you automatically and ask you to get in touch with us. Once you touch base we will firstly establish whether the pattern is due to an attack or another non sinister factor.

If it is due to an attack then what can be done?

When Google decided to go public with the importance of high quality links and more importantly the adverse effect of low quality links they obviously saw that there could be a major issue with negative SEO. To a degree we do buy in to the theory that bad links are simply ignored and will not move your ranking any higher or lower. However, we do also think that it’s of real benefit to show Google that you care about your link portfolio. So, Google introduced the ability to Disavow backlinks. This basically means that you are able to submit a .txt file informing them that you do not indorse certain links coming in to your site.

How do you establish your bad links and submit a Disavow file?

It’s really simple to do yourself or we can do it for you. For full information on this check out our new “how to submit a Disavow file to Google knowledge” base article.

You may also find the following video by Matt Cutts (head of Google's web spam team) interesting.

Got any questions about this article? Don’t be shy. Get in touch!