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Competitor hit me with spam backlinks? Organic traffic tanked as referring domains spiked

My site was doing well at the start of 2025, then suddenly tanked just as a load of toxic backlinks started pointing at it. A competitor even tried to buy my domain late last year; I turned them down, and a few months later this spam wave started. Now GSC shows “no data” for links, Ahrefs is full of junk, and I’m stuck wondering if this is negative SEO or just bad timing.

From March onwards I saw a big surge of new referring domains in Ahrefs; most of them are obviously toxic (PBN sellers, expired domain spam, auto-generated junk). By July/August, my organic traffic had basically fallen off a cliff, and it lines up almost exactly with the spike in backlinks.

Google Search Console shows no linking sites at all, so maybe Google is ignoring them? I’ve already uploaded a disavow file with the worst ones and I’m updating it as more come in. No manual actions flagged in GSC.

So my questions are:

  • Could this actually be negative SEO from a competitor (i.e. someone blasting my site with spam links)?
  • If GSC isn’t showing any of these links, is it more likely some sort of algorithm filter/quality issue rather than backlinks being counted?
  • Other than monitoring, disavowing, and trying to build stronger legit links, is there anything else I can actually do?

Any thoughts from people who’ve been through this would be massivly appreciated.

submitted by /u/nrugor
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from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://ift.tt/3cSH8zr
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