When helping clients with Penguin or manual actions for unnatural links, it's common for companies to start asking questions about negative SEO. Once clients understand how Penguin works, and how unnatural links could impact a website, they wonder what would stop competitors from launching an all-out attack on their own website. And more importantly, what type of defense strategy could they build to thwart a negative SEO attack?
Beyond negative SEO, unnatural links have an uncanny way of replicating themselves across more spammy sites (without a company actively setting up those new links). So, even if a competitor isn't launching a negative SEO campaign, situations like "replicating unnatural links" could end up coming back to hurt companies down the line.
For example, my column from October explained how a company first got hit by Penguin 2.0, andthen again by Penguin 2.1. It ends up they put a stake in the ground, and stopped monitoring unnatural links, so they ended up getting hit twice (versus recovering). Not good, to say the least.
This makes it hard for businesses that dug themselves into a hole to fully jump out of that hole. For some companies involved in unnatural link building over the past several years, it's like being part of an organized crime family. You can't just pick up one day and leave. There will be a price to pay.
Based on what I explained above about negative SEO and replicating unnatural links, defense measures can play an important part of a company's SEO efforts.
This post will give you several methods for monitoring, tracking, and analyzing, new unnatural links. After I cover each method, I'll explain what you can do with your findings (to avoid getting hit). Because when dealing with link problems, analysis is one thing, taking action is another.
Methods for Tracking New Unnatural Inbound Links
1. Google Webmaster Tools Latest Links
Many people don't realize that Google provides a separate download for a website's latest links.
If you head over to Google Webmaster Tools and click "Search Traffic" in the left sidebar, and then "Links to Your Site", you will see an overview of your inbound links.
If you click the "More" link under "Who links the most", you will see a list of all domains (top 1,000) linking to your site. At the top of that report, there are three buttons. One of those buttons is labeled "Download latest links".
When you download that report, you can see your latest links by date that Google has picked up. And yes, if you've been dealing with an unnatural links situation, the list might shock you.
You may see new spammy links showing up, which could be the result of older unnatural links replicating, or it could be negative SEO. The good news is that you'll know about the new links, and can take action.
2. Majestic SEO "New" Links
Majestic SEO is my favorite link analysis tool. It holds a boatload of data, provides a ton of functionality, and easily enables you to refine and download your links.
For our purposes today, the main navigation provides a link labeled "New", which will take you to a cool visualization of new links being discovered for the domain, subdomain, directory, or URL.
First, check out your trending. Does that look natural? Is there a spike over the past 90 days that looks strange? Does the trending match up with your content development, campaigns, etc.?
Majestic enables you to highlight any 14 day period in the chart to view the new links built during that timeframe (below the chart). Then you can easily export those links for further analysis in Excel. Also, Majestic provides "First Indexed", "Last Seen", and "Date Lost" fields, which can help determine what's going on.
Note, Majestic doesn't know when a link was actually first placed on the web, just when it was first indexed by its crawlers. There are times you will find a "First Indexed" date that's off. That's why it's important to analyze the links versus just taking the data as-is.
3. Open Site Explorer "Just Discovered"
Open Site Explorer also provides a nifty piece of functionality for finding new links. In the main navigation, there's a link for "Just Discovered" that takes you to a report listing all links the service has recently picked up (and sometimes just minutes after being published).
Using "Just Discovered", you can filter by the type of link (followed, nofollowed, 301, etc.), and select if you want to see new links to the domain, subdomain, or URL. In the report, you can view the URL linking to your site, the anchor text of the link, domain authority of the site linking to you, and the date the links were first discovered. Then you can easily export those results for further analysis in Excel.
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