Article Marketing +Unintended Result +Negative SEO +Disavow Tool?

[Dice79]

About a year and a half ago, we tried a few of the shadier SEO techniques, including Article Marketing on various Article Sites. I'm sure everyone knows that that entails.

We have just a few Articles out there pointing back to our target pages using our target Keyphrases. These Articles were well written, and at the time I believed gave us a bit of juice. Of course now with Penguin that juice dropped significantly, probably zero.

Doing some digging today I realized that Article spinners picked up on our Article, spun it, but still linked back to us.

Now not only do we have the original Article out but there is a link to us on all of these shady *** sites. Could be in the hundreds.

So the questions are:

• Are all of these links from the original article site linking back to us, now considered negative SEO links?
• Would this be a good reason to actually use the Disavow tool?
• Has anyone had a similar situation and used the Disavow tool and had success with it?
• Should we remove the Articles from the Article Sites?

Opinions please, thanks much!

-Dice

[Test-ok]

I would say no on all 4 of them.
But to really know, how are the articles ranking and why don't you know if it's been juiced or squeezed...speaking of
>>Of course now with Panda that juice dropped significantly, probably zero.
It would have been Penguin that dropped the juice and not Panda.

[Dice79]

The original Article doesn't rank at all anymore, and when you do a direct search for sentences from the article the primary article does not come up.

On the good side; not all of the sites that took the content are bad. A handful are good sites with links back to us, but the mass majority are shady spinner sites, PR 0;

[gazzahk]

I would not use the disavow tool unless you receive a manual warning from Google. Just do not wory about it is my advice

[Test-ok]

If you didn't get a unnatural link notice from Google, follow gazz's advice, what more than likely happened is all those spinner sites were holding you above water, then they lost their value and you followed suit.

[chiragparekh]

Keep an eye on such articles. if they are replicating then contact them and get them removed. if they are just few hundreds then ignore it and move on.

[NathanielB]

As above, I wouldn't worry too much about the links if google hasn't sent you a warning. But if you feel worried about them, you could email the site owners and ask them to either remove or nofollow your links, tell them as a good will jester your happy for them to keep the content (just a little kindness to try and get them on side and willing to edit your links).

Just noticed read this bit of your post again:

Doing some digging today I realized that Article spinners picked up on our Article, spun it, but still linked back to us.

Now not only do we have the original Article out but there is a link to us on all of these shady *** sites. Could be in the hundreds.

Do you mean sites are freshly re-posting your old poorly spun articles today? If so I would recommend getting the links removed from the original sites that these are being pulled from so you don't get a load of fresh spam links built for you, because that's the last thing anyone wants to have to worry about lol.

Once you have those removed, you could try contacting the sites that have/are freshly posting your articles to ask them if they would kindly remove your links (again tell them they are welcome to keep the content, just not the links), if that don't work you could try to report it to google.

[Dice79]

We did receive an unnatural link report, but this was 4-5 months ago when it seemed everyone was getting them. We did not notice any drop in ranks or Serps except for one of our primary key phrases. We ranked 1st for this 40k search term (High converter) in Dec 11 and have steadily fallen to now position 7, due mostly to the changes in the Google Algo during that time. We are having a rough time getting back.

We are highly successful on all terms except ones targeting this one page. As it happens we did article marketing to this page, and the article I mentioned above targets this page we are having issues with.

I really do not want to use the Disavow tool, and thought this might make for interesting conversation on the possibility of using it. Most likely we would try and do it manually first, contacting each site. (Especially ones that show up in Webmaster tools)

[Glenn Kilpatric]

One thing I never understand. we keep hearing that Spam links are bad for a site. So why arent people paying people to build spam links against their competitors to Nuke their sites ???

[gazzahk]

One thing I never understand. we keep hearing that Spam links are bad for a site. So why arent people paying people to build spam links against their competitors to Nuke their sites ???

Because it does not work and way to many people are posting speculative crap re links hurting their/others rankings. They had spam links that were helping. The links were devalued. There rankings have fallen.... All that has happened is a benefit Google did not think they should have has been removed.....

In addition to this Google has undergone major changes in how it counts link value. So it may also be other decent links just are not helping as much as they used to. My advice is concentrate on you on site much more these days as it is much more important in determining SERPs then it used to be. Google is using links to determine relevance less then it used to is my view.

Many people are now blaming all their ranking changes on spam link devaluation/penalty. The truth is probably more likely that Google has found better more relevant content elsewhere. It is now much easier to rank a site with limited link strength…

[Dr.Marie]

I had a similar issue. I had an article that I wrote for one of my sites. I mentioned another one of my sites using our main keyword as anchor text. (This was pre-Penguin). The original article was a surprise viral hit. Many sites copied it and posted it verbatim and suddenly I have a pile of links pointing back to our site for our main keyword.

At the time I thought it was great. I continued to work on that site and over the months the site began to creep up the first page.

Then Penguin hit on October 5 and suddenly we are on the middle of page 2 for that keyword.

Was it Penguin? Was I punished for spamming? I don't think I was penalized. I think that I initially got a big boost from having those anchor texted links, but then Penguin simply removed the benefit that I had been receiving.

My personal belief is that Penguin *can* be a penalty that causes you to not be able to rank for the keyword for which you spammed. But, that penalty is reserved for extreme spammers. There are some sites that, after Penguin have dropped into oblivion for a keyword. But, these are usually sites that have really obvious keyword manipulation from hundreds or thousands of article sites and the like.

I don't think that one article (or even a couple of articles) that get syndicated are going to cause you to be penalized.

[PathwayIns]

Because it does not work and way to many people are posting speculative crap re links hurting their/others rankings. They had spam links that were helping. The links were devalued. There rankings have fallen.... All that has happened is a benefit Google did not think they should have has been removed.....

In addition to this Google has undergone major changes in how it counts link value. So it may also be other decent links just are not helping as much as they used to. My advice is concentrate on you on site much more these days as it is much more important in determining SERPs then it used to be. Google is using links to determine relevance less then it used to is my view.

Many people are now blaming all their ranking changes on spam link devaluation/penalty. The truth is probably more likely that Google has found better more relevant content elsewhere. It is now much easier to rank a site with limited link strength…

Let me ask you a question though on the negative SEO, in theory you should be able to harm another site by slamming back links at the site With the exact same anchor text, so for instance If the competitors main keyword is Chiropractor Dallas Texas, And let's say that they have a well balanced Mix of anchor links, and you hit it with 5000 Anchor links Chiropractor Dallas Texas from spam sites, that Probably would harm tht keyword don't you think? (Should cause them to lose ranking)

Tricks like that are devious, Highly unethical, but Perhaps that's why Google came out with the disavow tool, What do you think?

[PathwayIns]

I had a similar issue. I had an article that I wrote for one of my sites. I mentioned another one of my sites using our main keyword as anchor text. (This was pre-Penguin). The original article was a surprise viral hit. Many sites copied it and posted it verbatim and suddenly I have a pile of links pointing back to our site for our main keyword.

At the time I thought it was great. I continued to work on that site and over the months the site began to creep up the first page.

Then Penguin hit on October 5 and suddenly we are on the middle of page 2 for that keyword.

Was it Penguin? Was I punished for spamming? I don't think I was penalized. I think that I initially got a big boost from having those anchor texted links, but then Penguin simply removed the benefit that I had been receiving.

My personal belief is that Penguin *can* be a penalty that causes you to not be able to rank for the keyword for which you spammed. But, that penalty is reserved for extreme spammers. There are some sites that, after Penguin have dropped into oblivion for a keyword. But, these are usually sites that have really obvious keyword manipulation from hundreds or thousands of article sites and the like.

I don't think that one article (or even a couple of articles) that get syndicated are going to cause you to be penalized.

So are you still doing Article syndication For your search engine optimization or have you backed off from that?

[gazzahk]

Let me ask you a question though on the negative SEO, in theory you should be able to harm another site by slamming back links at the site With the exact same anchor text, so for instance If the competitors main keyword is Chiropractor Dallas Texas, And let's say that they have a well balanced Mix of anchor links, and you hit it with 5000 Anchor links Chiropractor Dallas Texas from spam sites, that Probably would harm tht keyword don't you think? (Should cause them to lose ranking)

Tricks like that are devious, Highly unethical, but Perhaps that's why Google came out with the disavow tool, What do you think?

I think those rubbish links will not help or hurt. You may get told by Google if someone is doing this to a site and can tell them it is nothing to do with you.

If this was possible there would be multiple examples of it now.

An established site that suddenly get tons of useless links is not going to cause the established site to fall below where it was before the rubbish links were pointed at it.

A weak site that adds heap of rubbish links may initially climb and then fall. Google is smart enough to know no one is trying to Google bowl a new weak site so it must be the site owner and the site may get a Google slap beyond just a link devaluation.

The only time it is worth trying to Google bowl someone is if the site is strong and you want to compete. There is NO EVIDENCE of a strong site being Google bowled by the sudden addition of a heap of crap links.

[Test-ok]

and you hit it with 5000 Anchor links Chiropractor Dallas Texas from spam sites, that Probably would harm tht keyword don't you think? (Should cause them to lose ranking)

I like gazz think it'll only hurt the spammy sites that's sending the links.
1. If you purchase sites to spam your competitors you'll be wasting your time working of a site that's only going to get devalued because it'll be a site that's going to fall over the cliff.
and if you purchased this scheme
2. I can't imagine a good link builder with a bunch of good sites doing this because it'll only kill his good link building sites. And it won't work anyway. Let me rephrase that..it could work but he'll for sure lose his juice..and he'll end up with a linking site of zero value. (which would define a good and bad link builder)

The penalty:
A site got hit because they showed they had a bad habit of purchasing links...period, and it was a manual penalty, they lost the juice from these spammy sites and got hit with a manual penalty. The spammy sites that sent out hundreds of links with a bunch of the same anchor text get hit and doesn't come back...well it could come back but it's much cheaper and easier to start fresh one which takes a lot longer and is more expensive.

So the moral of this story is:
Stop trying to buck the system by taking down your competitor this way and make your site better. It's easier to put 100 percent into your site than putting 100 percent into all your competitors..your fighting bad odds and it'll end up costing more and you'll still be down the list.
Spending time trying to take your competitors down using these techniques is a waste of time and a stupid thought process.

Stop thinking of an easy way and do it the right way, then you'll be done. My brother told he got a cheap 50 foot hose for 6 dollars at the store after I told him mine cost 20 dollars...however he had to replace his 6 times while I still have that original $20 dollar hose. Do it right the first time!