Is Your Company Paying for Negative SEO? by Adam Reimer of Adam Reimer Marketing

1. Is Your Company
Paying for
Negative SEO?
Adam Riemer
@Rollerblader
www.AdamRiemer.me

2. Overview
Negative SEO isn’t just being done by competitors.
You have people YOU are paying:
Affiliate agencies/managers
PR firms
Influencer marketing campaigns
Review companies
Other???
@rollerblader

3. Why Would They Do This?
 Affiliate managers – They already talk about us, why
not reach out…it’s an easy target.
 Affiliates – Why shouldn’t I or we get paid for the
content we’ve already created
 PR – We need to measure and provide reporting
 Influencer – I need to show results to stay in business
 Other - Because we don’t know there is a negative
impact!
@rollerblader

4. How to Detect An Issue
What do you mean Merlot
isn’t a proper tool to
deal with link issues?
Let’s see you try without!
AdamRiemer.me

5. Find Disappearing or Changing
Links
 Download your links with
 Majestic SEO
 Search Console
 SEMRush
 Raven
 Other
Note: see if your tech team or analytics experts can pull a list of referring URLs that come from cloaked
links, redirects or other and also pull the original domain.
 Consolidate and de-duplicate
 Sort and compare numbers to previous month/week.
Note: pull the report and see if it recognizes redirects. You can also look for backlinks that have
parameters attached. By identifying the sources and parameters your vendors use, you can now see
what/who is being contacted and where you’re losing “organic looking” links.
@rollerblader

6. Downloading your links.
Step 1.
Step 2.
Step 3.

7. In This Tool Too #ad
http://www.adamriemer.me/smbtools/
Step 1. select SEO & backlink explorer
Step 2. type in your domain
Step 3. select historic index and entire domain
Step 4. hit explore

8. In This Tool
Majestic
Search for your links
and set your query
Now download.
Next it’s time to
search or sort.
Parameters
PR tags
UTM tags
Merchant IDs
Other???

9. In This Tool
Majestic (lets get crazy!)
Now click backlinks and
download again.
Column A has the pages with
the links.
Raw exports give you the
parameters as well.
(how many credits do you
have?)

10. In This Tool
Majestic They have a lost
Links report.
You can sort by
deleted and find
the date.
There is trust flow
And citation flow.
Pay attention, it
includes feeds
which you don’t
need to worry
about.

11. Find Disappearing or Changing
Links
When evaluating your link reports, ask yourself:
 Did they become redirects?
 Good time to also look for backlinks that point to redirecting pages
 Are they now no follow links?
 Is the amount of no follow increasing? (time to change strategies)
 Is there now an FTC disclosure on the page/site/post
 Have they been changed out for affiliate links?
 Which software does your company use?
 Network based
 In house
 Direct with parameters
 Do they now have tracking parameters?
 Pull referral reports from Google Analytics or Source and Medium. Look to see if there are more tracking
or less.
@rollerblader

12. How Does Google Find Them.
We’re just good like that!
AdamRiemer.me

13. How Can Google Find Monetized
or Paid Content?
 Javascripts
 Disclosures
 Cloaked links
 Patterns of links, images and brand mentions
 This occurs with large PR, Social and Influencer campaigns or sale
announcements.
 Contest/giveaway software
 URL parameters
 More???
http://www.adamriemer.me/advertising-disclosures-seo/
@rollerblader

14. Understanding Each Departments & Vendor’s
Needs & How to Work with them.
Understand you
needs? Let’s talk
about
mine,
starting with
a refill!AdamRiemer.me

15. Monetization Links
Webmasters are monetizing through many channels. Sponsored
posts, affiliate links, javascripts and more.
How does Google know who is paying and who isn’t?
 As yourself who paid for a post and then check to see if:
 Whose link is no followed
 If your backlink is no followed?
 Are the image links to your site no followed?
 Ask yourself again “How is Google supposed to know who paid for the
post?”
@rollerblader

16. Review Companies
 Unique reviews on your site
 This is going to become more important
 Is someone using a third party feed (UX Team, Customer Service, etc…)
 Check your affiliates as well. Sometimes they get a reviews feed for their site or they are a reviews
aggregator and sell reviews back to your company.
 Backlinks pointing to reviews
 Register both http and https
 Register both www and non www
 Check where your backlinks are pointing too
 Look for reviewers leaving links
 “check out my review here”
 Affiliate
 Direct
 Blog comment
 Other…
@rollerblader

17. Affiliate Links
 Apparently all 3XX redirects pass authority
You know they are affiliate links, but how does Google? Maybe you’re trying an old trick? Maybe
it’s in house or a refer-a-friend program.
 Old tactics for SEO include
 Buying and redirecting URLs
 Satellite sites and pages
 Moving domains
 Moving from www.sitebuilder.com/your-old-domain or subdomain versions
brandname.sitebuilder.com to stand alone TLDs.
@rollerblader

18. Javascript Example

19. Other???
 Blog plugins
 Do they allow do follow links instead of no follow
 What does your SEO neighborhood look like now?
 Crawl your blog/commenting software for external links
 Blog/community commenting software
 Not spambots
 Does the software monetize links and are you paying for sales from your
internal links and comments
 Javascripts – these get into your company through the affiliate program.
Remove them from the program and/or create a negative site list that they
are not allowed to monetize.
@rollerblader

20. What Can You Do?
 Create a list of Do Not Contact Sites
 Update weekly in a shared drive with other departments
 Make them upload weekly targets
 Have a two day leeway before they do outreach
 You can check for cross over this way
 Add it into your agency and consultants contracts to require this.
 Weekly meetings to go over
 Revenue and increased exposure vs. SEO value
 Who rejected the link you wanted and why
 By talking about these issues, others may see a fit for their channel and
may send you some better qualified leads.
@rollerblader

21. Conclusion
It is not your co-workers and agencies jobs to know SEO.
It is up to you to educate them and be on the lookout.
Set up meetings, common sheets to share and compare
targets and make sure you’re all on the same page. This
is the best way to help save your site from creating your
own negative SEO issues.

22. Thank You!
Adam Riemer
www.AdamRiemer.me
@rollerblader