Hey Fairuze,

I’m sorry to hear that someone attacked you. That’s time they could have spent helping themselves. It will come back around to them in one way or another.

I don’t think anyone really knows how long it takes for Google to disavow a link. They’re kind of mysterious about the whole process. Personally, I think 2-3 months is a good guess. We’ve used the disavow links tool a few times for clients but don’t have any super concrete data on it.

Best of luck, and please keep us updated.

We’ve recently been hit by a negative SEO attack ourselves. The effect we’ve seen so far was (a) a slight rise in rankings in Week 2 followed by (b) drop (slightly larger than the rise) in rankings in Week 3 onwards. We’ve disavowed the links, but still waiting for it to take effect.

I’m quite curious to see how quickly Google will act on disavowed links though. Do you happen to have any idea? Anecdotal evidence seems to suggest around 2 months.

Sam,

I saw an article about that recently. You probably know the one I’m talking about, but someone recorder how many link removal emails got a response that asked them to verify who they were. It was very few. That is somewhat alarming.

However, I think a lot of those sites were likely spammy, irrelevant or largely not made for human consumption. That article, at the very least, made us all aware that link removal can equal negative SEO, so we need to do our due diligence and check into it a little more when/if we ever get a removal request.

Thanks for reading.

Hi Pavan,

Thanks for reading.

Paid links, as a whole, are pretty easy for Google to catch sometimes. That’s true. And I think they’re tightening that up a little bit more as we speak. Nothing is ever totally bulletproof though, and I think some people who pay for negative links bank on that fact. It’s a wild world.

Hi Marius,

Thanks for reading.

You’re right about that, and it’s kind of funny to think about– good/positive SEO (link building in particular) needs to be done the right way or it can either do nothing or have some adverse effects. It’s a good point that negative SEO is the same way– you have to know what you’re doing.

I’m glad more people don’t know what they’re doing and don’t have the time to learn.

Google’s encouraged link removals and it’s become normal to receive mails of this sort. Knowing that there will be a few webmasters who don’t bother to verify the source of the mail, it isn’t too hard at least trying to remove someone else’s links.

I just wish Google would stop asking people to remove links and instead warned them about links being ignored.

But as you pointed out there is hardly anyone eager to spend the its resources to wage war against your site.