Google’s John Mueller says site owners shouldn’t worry about negative SEO attacks that involve malicious backlinks.
A blogger reached out to Mueller on Twitter saying they were concerned about their website getting “backlink bombed.”
The site’s backlink profile went from 2,000 referring domains to over 12,000 in the span of a month.
Unless one of their articles went viral and picked up thousands of natural links, this is a fairly obvious attempt at negative SEO.
It’s likely that someone is building a large number of low quality links in an attempt to damage the site’s reputation, or maybe even trigger a Google penalty.
The site owner says they’ve been disavowing the domains but can’t keep up with all the new links.
@JohnMu looking for some help. Our website is getting "backlink bombed" We have gone from 2,000 reffering domains to over 12,000 in one month.
Tried disavowing domains but it's hard to keep up. Sent Google feedback via search console this am.
What is the best course of action?
— The Savvy Couple (@TheSavvyCouple) February 17, 2019
So, what can they do?
In short, the best course of action is to do nothing, Mueller says.
“I’d ignore them.”
Google has systems in place to ignore these types of links.
In other words, someone is wasting their time building all these links.
I'd ignore them. Someone's wasting their time on something our systems have a lot of practice at ignoring :).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 18, 2019
So if this happens to you, don’t waste your own time by trying to fight off all the malicious links.
Recently, Google published a 30-page white paper which goes into detail about the types of systems Mueller is referring to.
Google has become quite adept at defending its search index from spammy practices, such as attempts to manipulate search rankings either positively or negatively.
You can read my quick recap of the 30-page document here.
