Google’s John Mueller says site owners shouldn’t worry about negative SEO attacks, including malicious backlinks.
One blogger reached out to Mueller on Twitter about his concerns about his website being “backlink bombed.”
The site’s backlink profile grew from 2,000 referring domains to over 12,000 in one month.
Unless one of their articles goes viral and gets thousands of natural links, this is clearly a negative SEO effort.
Someone could be creating too many low quality links to damage your site’s reputation or cause Google penalties.
The site owner has disavowed the domain but says he can’t keep up with all the new links.
@John Moo Seeking help. Our website is getting “backlink bombing” In one month he went from 2,000 referring domains to over 12,000.
I’ve tried disavowing the domain, but I’m having trouble catching up. I submitted feedback to Google via Search Console this morning.
What is the best course of action?
— Smart Couple (@TheSavvyCouple) February 17, 2019
So what can they do?
In short, says Muller, the best course of action is to do nothing.
“I ignore them.”
Google has a system in place to ignore this kind of link.
In other words, someone is wasting their time building all these links.
i ignore them. Someone is wasting their time on things our system ignores so much :).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 18, 2019
So if this happens, don’t waste your time trying to fight off all malicious links.
Google recently published a 30 page white paper. This white paper elaborates on the types of systems Mueller refers to.
Google has been adept at defending its search index from spammy practices, such as attempts to manipulate search rankings in a positive or negative way.
A brief summary of the 30-page document can be read here.
