which helped clear things up

[rochon.a1.119]

This unusual spike resulted in manual action by Google. The webmaster had to run an in-depth backlink audit and submit a reconsideration request to Google along with disavow files.

It took two requests for reconsideration to lift the penalty filter, which was removed in August 2019, almost a year later.

In the second request, the webmaster emphasized that it was a a complete list of unit mobile database negative SEO attack, and lift the penalty. And as of today, the rankings are still recovering.

Example 2

This is another type of suspicious negative SEO attack. In fact, it could be affecting the SEMrush website as of today. It started in November 2019, when we detected a spike in toxic backlinks posted on identical websites. Below is an example of one of the websites.

image.png

Suspicious activity doesn't lead to obvious negative results. However, we're still somewhat busy monitoring these unexpected backlinks. Most of these links are directed to pages that don't exist.

How to protect a website from fake backlinks?
Here is a list of actions to take:

Use the Backlink Audit tool on your website regularly and keep an eye on the Toxic Score metric to detect any suspicious changes in your backlink profile.