Is Negative SEO true?
Hi everyone!
Recently, my website dropped in Google rankings. Traffic went from around 300 queries per day to almost zero practically overnight.
I started investigating the situation and discovered a lot of backlinks in GSC like these:
http://18.123.162.10/i-random-words-2
http://18.351.162.10/i-random-words
What’s interesting is that all of these IP addresses belong to AWS.
What did I do?
- I disavowed these kinds of backlinks using the Google Disavow tool
- I ran them through an indexer service to speed up Googlebot crawling
And surprisingly, the site started recovering just as quickly as it had dropped. I don’t think the Google Disavow tool actually helped — Google probably just removed all these backlinks from the index. Because the links don’t open when accessed directly. Most likely, they no longer exist.
So, does this mean toxic backlinks really do have an impact? And is it actually that easy to manipulate search rankings?