I Was Hit by a Negative SEO Attack and It Hurt My Rankings

I was — and currently am — the victim of a negative SEO attack. Over the last six weeks I watched my traffic drop quickly. Alarmingly so. I post content regularly, have good technical SEO, use schema properly and was always moving upwards, more impressions, more clicks. At first I blamed the fact that I use AI to help me write, then I remembered something from back in November: my backlinks jumped from 700 to over 4,000 almost overnight.

At the time I didn’t think much of it. My traffic had been slowly increasing, so I chalked it up to growth and SEMRush didn’t flag them as toxic. That was a mistake.

Table of Contents

1. How a Negative SEO Attack Works
2. How I Found the Negative SEO Attack
3. How to Fix a Negative SEO Attack With Google’s Disavow Tool
4. Lessons Learned: What I’d Do Differently

How a Negative SEO Attack Works

A negative SEO attack is when someone deliberately builds thousands of low-quality, spammy backlinks to your website to trigger a Google penalty. It’s the same shady tactic websites used 15 years ago — backlink farms, link directories, scrapers — except now it’s being weaponized against competitors.

Google’s algorithm sees a sudden, unnatural spike in backlinks and eventually penalizes the target site, even though the site owner had nothing to do with it. It’s dirty, it’s common, and it works.

Who does this? Usually a competitor who wants to knock you down in the rankings. A negative SEO package can be purchased for as little as $5 on shady forums. Five minutes of their time. Months of damage for you.

How I Found the Negative SEO Attack

When I started digging into those backlinks, the pattern was immediately obvious. Hundreds of blogspot blogs with gibberish names, web directories with zero real content, domain scrapers — all pointing at Darkstar Media. They all followed the same template, which tells me someone is running this on a massive scale.

A few other red flags worth watching for:

• Foreign language sites with no relevance to your industry
• Gambling or casino sites linking to completely unrelated content
• Sudden spikes in referring domains — hundreds in a short window

Here’s the frustrating part: I use SEMrush, which is supposed to monitor these things. It never flagged the backlinks as toxic. For almost three months it still hasn’t. If you use SEMrush for backlink monitoring, just know this tool cannot be fully trusted for toxicity detection — you have to dig into the list yourself and use your own judgment. That is not a mistake I will make again.

How to Fix a Negative SEO Attack With Google’s Disavow Tool

Google has a disavow tool — you can access it through your Search Console account here: https://search.google.com/search-console/disavow-links

This is where you tell Google to ignore specific backlinks when evaluating your site. Here’s the process I used:

1. Export your full backlink report from SEMrush
2. Download your existing disavow list from Google Search Console
3. Go through the backlink list and identify toxic domains
4. Add them to your disavow file in this format: domain:spammydomain.com
5. Upload the updated file to Google’s disavow tool

The new toxic links are still coming in daily, so this isn’t a one-time fix. It’s something I’ll need to stay on top of — regularly checking for new spammy domains and updating the disavow list as they come in.

Now it’s a waiting game. Daily checks for new links, keeping the disavow list updated, and continuing to write good content to rebuild impressions and clicks.

Lessons Learned: What I’d Do Differently

In retrospect, I could have prevented most of this damage if I’d acted the moment I saw that backlink spike in November. When your backlink count jumps from 700 to 4,000 in a short period, that is not organic growth — that is a red flag. Lesson learned.

A few things I’m doing going forward:

• Check backlink reports monthly — don’t just glance at the number, look at the actual domains
• Don’t rely solely on toxicity scores — SEMrush missed this entirely for months
• Act immediately on unusual spikes — even if traffic looks fine at the time
• Keep a running disavow file (You can always download and re-upload through Google’s tool) — add to it regularly rather than doing one big cleanup

If your traffic has dropped suddenly and you can’t figure out why — check your backlinks. Rule out a negative SEO attack before blaming your content strategy.