Is this some type of Negative SEO?

PROFRBcom

Rakeback affiliate and professional poker player.
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As some of you may have gathered from my last post in this forum, I'm pretty much a noob at all this webmaster business. I've been a pro poker player running a website, Professional Rakeback, on the side for 9 years, and now I'm trying to take it a bit more seriously.

So with that said, I was digging through WMT last night and looking at my links. I found a site with hundreds of links to Professional Rakeback. I checked the site out and it was really ugly and spammy looking.

Spammy site: bestonlinepokerbonus dot com

Upon further inspection, I found another site with the exact same look linking to us:

Spammy site #2: blackjackreport dot com

As you can see, they look exactly the same. Then, I found about 50 more sites with this exact same look by digging through their "links" section. Looking through WMT, some of these sites were linking to me as well.

I'm assuming that this is what a negative SEO campaign looks like? Sending us a couple thousand garbage links like this?


Some more specific questions below, and remember, I'm a noob, so ELI5 if you can ;)


1) So my next step is to disavow them in WMT yes? I've never done that before, and I just want to make sure that's the right move.

2) I've also checked in MajesticSEO and seen hundreds of links from other garbage looking/spammy sites like "bestpokertracker dot com" pointing at my site. That site doesn't show up in my WMT list of links though. I was curious if anyone can tell me why that is? Is Google aware that that is such a shit site it doesn't even list it for me in my WMT links? No need to disavow it or go for it anyway to be safe?

3) I've found nearly 100 domains with links pointing to us that have no real content other than blurbs from other sites. Sites that I can't imagine get any real traffic and are some type of automated... well, I don't know what, but trash. If I manage to figure out how to disavow properly, would it possibly be detrimental to my website to remove so many links all at once? Even if they are spammy in nature? I mean, our site has some decent KW rankings at this point (hence my desire to work more on it) and I wish to keep our existing rankings in tact!
 

Shay

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If they are garbage sites and you suspect an attempted negative attack - you will sleep better at night by creating a disavow file and putting any site that you're concerned about in that file.

That aside, if they are scraping your site in whole or in part - file a DMCA. I also suspect that the whois telephone contact (4125767429) is probably not going to lead you to the actual website owner listed on the whois for bestonlinepokerbonus - dotcom, though I did not try the number so that is pure speculation on my part.

The listed address is to a mailing service. Their listed business address (doing some research) is 1717 MURRAY AVE #19 PITTSBURGH PA 15217
 
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