New lots of links linked in short then traffic dropped significantly! has google penalized me?

Summary of Discussion 1: Negative SEO – new lots of links linked in short then traffic dropped significantly! has google penalized me?
Jawad
I have never worked on creating backlinks for my website. However, I used to have a look at them every now and then.
A couple of months ago, I saw a sharp increase in the number of backlinks. I didn't damn care for that.
In September update my traffic dropped by 30% but I couldn't correlate it with backlinks.
In November update, it was further reduced by 40% and now I started reading blogs and posts about why Google is taking actions against me.
Now my site is generating only 25% of traffic what it used to generate before December 2020 update and I have not done anything bad. My competitors pages contain low quality content and still ranking way higher than me.
I have some questions to ask
1. Do you think Google has penalized me for these backlinks which can't be real in this quantity 19k?
2. Any useful cheaper option to find all the links which are referring to my domain.
3. Does disavowing links really work?
4. Is there any tool which can help me segregate spammy links from proper links?
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Dushan
It's a negative SEO attack, without question.
In response to your questions:
1. Yes.
2. Majestic for backlink check only. Ahrefs for backlink and rank tracking.
3. Yes.
4. See answer #2.
My Advice:
1. Read up & understand what's happening. Search “Negative SEO” related keywords for articles such as – & https://seopressor.com/blog/what-is-negative-seo/
2. Use Ahrefs and conduct a backlink audit weekly. It may seem intimidating to go through 19k+ links, but you can disavow as domain specific (so likely the 19k backlinks are actually from 4K spammy domains, for example – more on that in a bit). If it's your money maker, it deserves the effort. Tip: Arrange them in the correct format for disavowing.
3. Ensure that you have your Google Search Console (GSC) account is active. This will allow you to get alerts for penalties/issues and disavow all spammy links.
Note: Negative SEO bots tend to use a pool of existing domains and mainly spam your site from this group. Marking the backlinks down as domain specific instead of link specific (for disavowing), is more of a “catchall” and will allow google to disregard all links from one domain, also saves you time when conducting the audit/disavowing process.
4. Submit disavow list. Secure your site. Gain rankings back. Buy me a beer✌🏼
Good luck.
NEILPATEL.COM
How to Protect Your Website from Negative SEO
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Jawad ^✍️ » Dushan
thanks a lot man for the detailed guide. Appreciate your support.
There were numerous p0rn sites referring to my websites.
Secondly, half of the websites are not even opened in the browser as if the website doesn't exist but search console list is showing a backlink from them so I added them in the list too. Out of 1k sites, 670 were 100% spam so I only added them in the disavow. For many sites, I was not sure so I didn't touch them for the time being.
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Prasad » Jawad
someone is trying to get it down. Try SEO autopilot.
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Juan
I had the same issue and did exactly what others suggested. I disavowed like 600+ links that I never asked for (according to Moz most of the links to images from my blog). I ran an e-commerce in Colombia and our blog had hundreds of spammy inbound links according to Moz. Also from Moz I exported the inbound links list and disavowed all those links with spam score above 12% and with no anchor text.
Also to I used Cloudflares hotlink protection to prevent others from using our images. https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170026-What-does-enabling-Cloudflare-Hotlink-Protection-do-
We lost almost 30% of our organic traffic but after doing this a couple of weeks ago our traffic drop stopped.
Hope this helps you.
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Jawad ^✍️ » Juan
great! Have you recovered your traffic after disavowing those links?
Juan
The traffic loss stopped but so far we have not recovered anything . We uploaded the .txt file two weeks ago with half of the links. Yesterday I uploaded the other 300+ links. Our sales got a hit and we didn't grow anything last month.
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Summary of Discussion 2: Negative SEO – new lots of links linked in short then traffic dropped significantly! has google penalized me?
Jawad
My website was hit by negative SEO and I have lost 70% of my traffic with September and November update.
I disavowed the links but it didn't have any positive impact, no recovery. There were hundreds of p0rn and spammy websites referring to my domain which I disavowed.
My question is that is it a good idea to transfer all my articles to a new website and redirect the URL from the current one. Would the negative juice be transferred with the redirect link?
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Eva
If you 301 the spammed domain to the new one you will be redirecting all the negative effects. It happens all the time when people buy and expired domain with a high DR/DA but bad backlink profile.
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Strauss
I would love to hear how people determine that they were hit by negative seo – not saying it didn't happen, its just not the road I take when rankings take a dive.
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Jawad ^✍️ » Strauss
I never worked on creating backlinks. I still had around 13,000 search traffic a day. After Nov update, it reduced to 4,000.
The keywords where I was ranking in top 5 position, Google threw me on the 10th page. It didn't happen with 1 or 2 but around 50 keywords.
At that time I started looking at the reason and found 19k backlinks. Most of them are coming from spammy websites. Isn't it a negative SEO attack?
Strauss
I have worked on monster sites, we both gain and lose that many links in a day, and the reason I ask is that Google for the most part figures it out, if the link isn't relevant it gets nurfed, but also I have used links to break a site, it's just a really high effort thing, something that becomes a job all by itself. usually it's an algo update that favors intent in some way – so it would be interesting to see what caused it. But like you said, it happened with the an update in Nov, so it's possibly just an algo update, that's not negative, there isn't another SEO with cross-hairs on your site, it's an algorithmic ranking metric where you aren't stacked high. get someone to run a core report on your highest value term and see where the current leaders are crushing it.

Lieven
Google thinks your site is a WordPress template if you use your phone or address in 2 or more sites without canonical. Remove all your contact details and replace them by new. Google just thinks you were lazy to not remove the generic address.
Eugene
How do you know it was the negative SEO that tanked your rankings. Did you get a notification in Google webmaster? Because if you didn't it's those links were not the factor. Yes they could be shitty links, but if we trying go decide what was the reason….

Jawad ^✍️
Eugene I never worked on creating backlinks. I still had around 13,000 search traffic a day. After Nov update, it reduced to 4,000.
The keywords where I was ranking in top 5 position, Google threw me on the 10th page. It didn't happen with 1 or 2 but around 50 keywords.
At that time I started looking at the reason and found 19k backlinks. Most of them are coming from spammy websites. Isn't it a negative SEO attack?
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Jackie
Disavow isn't a switch, it will take 30 to 90 days
Najam
Same happened with my client site, his business is tour agency in Morocco: here is what happened and what I did:
1: From 200 rd to 5k rd and thousand of links in just 1-2 weeks, all these links were from spammy sites as above.
2: Site lost its 80% of rankings.
3: Filtered out all those domains by using search console and Ahrefs, created a file and submitted in google disavow tool.
4: New spammy links kept appearing for 2 months and we keep on disavowing them.
5: Webmaster tools takes time to deindex or to remove them from the webmaster links listing. It almost took 4-8 weeks to stop showing those domains in webmaster.
6: After that, I bought some high quality links, some niche edits and some with manual outreach. All focus was on sites with relevancy and traffic.
7: We also revamped the old content with new one and improved the user experience (UX) in between.
8: It's 4rth month now and site have started to gain traffic on old and new terms as well.
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Jawad ^✍️ » Najam
In one month, my traffic went down from 13,500 to 2,600 now and further decreasing day by day. Do you think it is a good idea to dump the entire site and move its content to a new site without any redirect. I know my content is way better than my competitors, still Google is ranking me on the 15th and 20th page for some reasons.
Najam » Jawad
no, not good idea.
Lemme put my two cents, if you want to run site for longer run than disavow the links first. Give some time to the site to let it recover, least is 2 months. When site starts to recover or regain rankings, do 301 redirect it to new site and take all the content there (that's the proper way to tell crawlers that you have moved to a new site, else of you do as said in above comment as without 301 than it will cause content duplication). Also in redirection, redirect each url to its corresponding one.
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Jawad ^✍️ » Najam
thanks a ton man!
Najam » Jawad
further more, if it is not a brand or proper company site than I won't recommend to take a negative seo site for longer run because it will take 2x more effort to progress and result won't be same as of before.
Jawad ^✍️ » Najam
I have been running the website for 6 years and it has gradually got the traffic.
All of a sudden it went down to nothing.
Someone commented that with the redirect, the negative juice will also be transferred to the new domain which will make the new website useless again.
This is the reason I thought to get rid of this domain, move all the articles to a new domain and let Google reindex everything.
Najam
Jawad if you get rid of the negative as i said above and it will take few months after disavow to get the rankings back. Than you can redirect, it won't pass any negative link juice.
Also moving articles to new domain without 301 will be content duplication
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Jawad ^✍️ » Najam
I appreciate your support brother

Ashley
Redirects just redirects the penalty. If you had a massive spike in links and it was SEO (only day that as Google's John M confirmed the latest updates were content related) then the best course of action is to combine as many link reports as you can get your hands on, search console, Ahrefs, majestic etc. Wack them in ‘link detox' to get the complete picture and submit a better disavow file to ALL search console properties for that domain (e.g. whole domain or the 4 www, non www, http and https depending on how it's setup).
The use link detox boost or a ping service to get google to index them.
Then keep on top of new links coming in and disavow them, these tools can take weeks or months to find them all.
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Suganth
Don't redirect it will hurt your new domain as well and don't copy the content to new domain.
Try to solve the old domain. I see some clients hit by both updates and then they recovered within 10 to 15 days
From my knowledge what they did is disavowed bad links pointing to their website and gave boost with some quality links continuously. Then they started to grow and now recovered full traffic and even improved from the past
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Abuzar » Suganth
best practice at all.

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