Unnatural links: 4 ways to avoid Negative SEO

To protect yourself from the impact of a negative SEO attack or from unnatural links that could compromise your search engine rankings, it is crucial to understand how Penguin works: to this end we will show you four effective ways to spot suspicious incoming entries.

• Google Webmaster Tools lets you to check incoming links to your site by consulting "Links to your site" under "Search Traffic": this item gives you an overview, but by clicking on ''More'' the information will be more detailed and you can export this to an Excel file with details of the latest connections with a click under the section "Download latest links".
• Majestic SEO is a great tool for link analysis: an impressive collection of data, rich in functionality and easy to use. Under "New" there is the last link, classified by domain, subdomain, directory or URL . Verifying the trend of the last 90 days you can identify anomalous movements to analyse: you should take into account that Majestic is not able to give information about when the link first appeared on the web, but it only offers information on its indexing.
• Also Open Site Explorer offers an interesting link check feature: in the main navigation menu there is the "Just Discovered" section which summarises the last links, sometimes even just a few minutes after the publication. In this section it is also possible to filter the type of link (followed, nofollowed, 301, etc.) and it can be classified by domain, subdomain or URL. These results can also be exported into Excel.
• Ahrefs offers excellent control functions: by entering a domain under Site Explorer it is possible to check the incoming links in "New" under "Backlinks". You can observe certain ranges (the current day, the previous one, last week, the last 30 or 60 days) but the flexibility of Ahrefs allows you to observe periods chosen by the user even in a practical graph. You can use these tools to get monthly reports and hunt unnatural links, manually removing them and deciding, depending on the situation, whether to block a single URL or a suspicious domain.