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Spammy guest post/directory site links - neg SEO attacks

         

Myles0920

5:55 pm on Jan 14, 2026 (gmt 0)



Has anyone had experience dealing with ongoing negative SEO attacks? My site has been battling against these attacks for over 4 years now and I am sick of it. I am not going to go into details but basically I have lost hundreds of thousands of page views per month. I used to get about 5-6000 clicks pre day from Google, today this number is pretty much zero. This was my full time job and I made a decent living - today I make nothing. Nevertheless, I have continued working 60 hours weeks, publishing regularly despite the setbacks.

In addition to tons of exact match anchor text backlinks, I also have hundreds of shady guest post/directory links. They are always do-follow and they make it look like I am paying to list my site on these crummy lists. They appear to be indexed by Google. Like I said, I have hundreds of these. My traffic has been down for years now and I still get these daily.

I wonder why someone would pay so much money (this one is $150 for 30 website listings) to take me out of search when I no longer rank for anything? I am guessing they are making sure I never come back so everyone does not know "the source" of their articles. Since I lost all my money, I would prefer not to pay for Semrush and Ahrefs subscriptions. There has to be a better way to take defense against these scammers? Any help would be appreciated.


[edited by: not2easy at 7:04 pm (utc) on Jan 14, 2026]
[edit reason] See Charter [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

not2easy

7:26 pm on Jan 14, 2026 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Hi Myles0920 and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Unfortunately this is a common problem today, most declining visits started when Google added AIOverviews to the results and even the best sites are no longer shown until further pages of results are viewed. Even if all the unwanted links were gone, your site would be fortunate to be on page 5 or 6. To see how the situation is affecting others, you can look at our monthly forums for Google/SEO: [webmasterworld.com...] and AdSense: [webmasterworld.com...]

It is not a happy space today. I hope you'll get some suggestions from others. In my experience, bogus links are eventually ignored by Google, within a week or two.

Kendo

11:32 pm on Jan 14, 2026 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



bogus links are eventually ignored by Google

How are they even being considered?

While a search engine is claiming to be able to ignore spammy (low reputation) backlinks, how are those links getting back into the equation?

Taran

10:53 am on Mar 6, 2026 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Hundreds of spam directory links rarely cause a long term collapse by themselves because Google usually ignores obvious link spam patterns, so the first thing I would check is whether the traffic drop actually coincided with a core update or a content quality reevaluation rather than the links, then export your backlinks from Search Console which is free and look for anchor clusters where the same keyword repeats across many domains, if you see that pattern create a disavow file for those domains and submit it, but also review your own pages because many sites that think they were hit by negative SEO actually lost rankings when competitors published deeper content or when large sections of thin or duplicated pages started diluting the overall site signals.
 

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