One of our sites lost its ranking suddenly. When checked the webmaster backlink list we found dozens of spam links. The links where with our top ranking keywords as anchor text and was presented in between the contact us, about us kind of menus. Later it was discovered that one of my competitor was doing the bad link submission. The sites which he submitted our links where including porn content and some Viagra selling sites with bad reputation. Only thing left for us to do was find out all those links and submit for Google disavow tool. And as you may know it takes months to be taken an action upon it... We filed a complaint to the Police Cyber cell and we named the person we had doubt on. He owned those sites, and we submitted some proof to the police about it. The police acted quickly even they don't know who Matt Cutts was!!! the result was amazing. That man (an SEO) was called up on to the police station and in minutes the police was able to get his confession.. He removed the back links and even deleted those sites. Our rankings came back quickly and performed even better.. See you got another Tool which works faster than Disavow, the Police!!!!
I like it! I get sick and tired of spammers thinking they are getting away with their stuff because they think they're hiding behind "internet anonymity."
I'm very surprised this happened but congrats! Just remember though that this is a very aggressive approach and there's been many US cases based on linking and whether a link to a website violates any sort of law and can warrant a link removal. In all cases they've lost in court.
Even we were surprised. Some of those proofs that we submitted to the police worked well. This made that guy confess. I Don't think the police could have done that with out the proofs. I shared this to show that internet anonymity won't always work and sometimes you will get caught red handed....
Building links to porn sites and Viagra sites to try and shaft a competitor up the doogle doesn't actually work.. especially if your competitor is not relevant to that niche... It's too obvious and google is not that daft
This is where I find people doing negative SEO oblivious. That's not how it works and I have yet to see an example where spamming a site with porn/pharma and so on has hurt its rankings. Negative SEO works when you spam a site in the natural way that the webmasters ahd been building links for it. The scary part is you can neg SEO site for a few hundred bucks from fiverr.
I think porn back links hurts. Because Matt had mentioned about porn site back links while discussing about Disavow tool. Another funny thing is those back links where not usual one like an anchor text in content, profile created, blog comment, etc. There where our top keywords in between the about us and contact us link in the menu. They where linking to our home page!!! That makes it 100% spammy isn't it?