Blackhat SEO: Can spam affect your search engine rankings?

In an online discussion group for site managers, a person said that they discovered their site had been attacked with negative SEO. The attack involved thousands of spam comments on blogs with their website's URL and keywords. It happened without the owner's permission. They had some questions for the community. First, they wanted to know if the attack would affect their organic traffic on Google. They also wanted to know if it would be possible to clean up or disavow the bad links.

The first commentator said that it would not be possible to clean up the bad links. They added that Google ignores blog comments. They said that the original poster could disavow the links if SEO and traffic reports suggest that the comments are causing their SERP to drop. Someone else said that the entire purpose of disavow is this situation. Another person recommended that the original poster look at their rankings on several sites now and use that information to decide whether or not to engage the disavow option.

Another person agreed that Google ignores this stuff. If Google didn't ignore it, then everybody would do this. Someone else chimed in that if the original poster's site has been around for at least a couple of years, this attack would do no harm, and it could actually do a little bit of good.

A few people disagreed that spam links are not harmful. If they were not a problem, then everyone would send them to all kinds of sites every day in order to try to get a boost to themselves or a cut in traffic of competing sites. Others disagreed with them, saying that blackhat SEO can get the perpetrator penalized. It can also sometimes get the victim penalized.

One person said this happened to them, and they used the disavow tool. They did not not wait long enough to find out whether or not the attack really did make a difference in their ranking. They got it sorted out in order to preserve their reputation and to avoid any type of appearance of blackhat SEO. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/l8k186/someoneattackedoursitewithnegativeseo/.