Negative SEO refers to the practice of using black hat, unethical or illegal techniques to negatively impact a competitor’s SEO ranking in search engines.
Is negative SEO a myth or a reality? Can a competitor really harm your website’s SEO on Google’s search engine? How to identify these black hat SEO attacks and protect yourself from them?
This article aims to better explain the concept of negative SEO and the methods used to harm your positions and your SEO.
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What is negative SEO?
Negative SEO is a set of activities aimed at reducing the ranking of competitors’ sites in search engine results.
Negative SEO is at the very least an admission of weakness on the part of your competitors coupled with a lack of ethics and honor.
Rather than trying to be better and surpass you in the rankings through hard work, some will leave panache and chivalry aside to indulge in detestable techniques.
Google via one of its executives has actually confirmed the possibility of such practices.
“We are working very hard to prevent these problems. We are also working on our algorithms to try to recognize these types of problems and solve them in advance. In practice, I rarely see issues about this and when I do, if I think it may be a competitor who created the problem, the team is usually willing to look at the details, see what happened and make sure there is no issue that is artificially causing problems for a website.” John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst
Negative SEO attacks can use different direct or indirect methods:
- Mass backlink generation method.
- Attacking copyrights.
- Duplication of your content (duplicate content).
- Site hacking and server attack.
- Denunciation of your network.
- Deleting your links.
- Writing negative reviews.
Related topic: White Hat SEO versus Black Hat SEO – Definitions & Differences
What are the main techniques?
Several techniques more or less effective can harm your site and your positions for more or less long periods. What are they?
Mass backlinks generation
Initially, links that Google thought were spam were simply ignored. This allowed SEOs to create thousands without worrying about a negative impact from poor-quality links.
In April 2012, Google launched the update and an algorithm called Pinguin. For the first time, it took heavy action and penalties against sites using abusive techniques, punishing many sites in the process that had not deliberately sought to break its rules. See how to generate and obtain quality inbound links.
From this date, the generation of low-quality backlinks and optimized anchors has become a sword of Damocles for those who play too much with the new limits dictated by the algorithms. See our article that explains what a good linking strategy is.
From this constant, some unscrupulous SEOs have seen an opportunity to penalize their competitors by generating mass low-quality links hoping to trigger the wrath of Google’s algorithms on the targeted site.
The techniques of negative SEO via backlinks are :
- Registration of your site in a link farm.
- Spam generation with software that automates the task.
- Purchase of domain names blacklisted for spam and direct redirection to the domain to be penalized.
- Creating exact anchors or anchors with a bad reputation (porn, viagra, online games, casino…).
- Creation of hidden links penalized.
Regular analysis of backlinks is necessary to identify the attempts of abuse.
Duplicating your content
When Google detects duplicate content on several sites, it usually chooses only one version to rank.
In general, Google is smart enough to identify the original source of content. Unless the copy is indexed before the original or on a site with a higher authority than yours.
Some unscrupulous webmasters will therefore try to duplicate the texts of your pages en masse on other platforms or on sites with a higher authority.
Duplication of content can also take place via tools that retrieve texts on the Internet to mix them and create content in the form of a ball, intended to be referenced on thousands of long-tail keywords and generate traffic over a more or less short period.
Attack on copyrights
An attack derived from content duplication consists in reporting your text to Google as copyright abuse. By making your original text look like a copied copyright infringement text, your page can be removed from the index.
Site hacking
The most aggressive and least easy method of negative SEO is to directly attack your site through various actions.
Here is a list of possible actions:
- Adding content to your site without your knowledge via code makes these changes invisible. Once developed, it is rare to go back to the source code regularly.
- Modifying the robot.txt to include a line of code asking Google not to index the site and your pages will eventually disappear from the search engine.
- Inject malware. If it is classic hacking that has nothing to do with a competitor related to SEO, it can play on your positioning. If Google suspects a site has been hacked, it may downgrade your site or add the line “this site may be hacked” to its search results.
False reporting of your network
This is not a direct form of negative SEO, but a practice that could have a significant impact on your search engine optimization.
Today, few sites, especially on competitive queries, respect 100% the recommendations and rules of Google in terms of fake link generation.
Competitors can spy on your link profiles, trace your network, identify their origin and report you.
If certain practices are criminalized, they can use Google’s spam reporting tools to report your exchanges, paid links, private blog networks (PBNs), or any other attempts at manipulation.
This can then have a direct impact on your results by removing the power of the links if the partner site is penalized, or result in a manual penalty against your site.
Writing negative reviews
Negative reviews do not directly impact your SEO, but negative reviews on your company’s results page can be a major deterrent to clicks or purchases.
The goal of SEO is to capture targeted traffic and get targeted action. Undermining your e-reputation and moving away from the goal of the SEO strategy is in a way harming it.
Causing removal of your backlinks
Many SEO tools allow you to know the links that are made to a site and therefore to identify which sites they are made from.
It is enough for a malicious and evil competitor to usurp your identity to contact the sites linking to yours and ask them to remove the links for various reasons.
By going after the sites that are doing their best, the negative consequences can be quite quick.
This is not a direct form of negative SEO, but a practice that could have a significant impact on your search engine optimization.
Today, few sites, especially on competitive queries, respect 100% the recommendations and rules of Google in terms of fake link generation.
Competitors can spy on your link profiles, trace your network, identify their origin and report you.
If certain practices are criminalized, they can use Google’s spam reporting tools to report your exchanges, paid links, private blog networks (PBNs), or any other attempts at manipulation.
This can then have a direct impact on your results by removing the power of the links if the partner site is penalized, or result in a manual penalty against your site.
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How to protect yourself from negative SEO attacks?
It is not possible to prevent all attacks, but you can still take precautions.
Stay connected with Google
Register your site with Search Console and set up options to receive alerts in these cases:
- When you receive a manual penalty.
- When you have problems connecting to the server.
- When your website is attacked by malware.
- When your pages are not indexed.
Monitor your backlinks
There are software programs that allow you to track and audit the backlinks, and then warn you when they are no longer active. Use this type of software to verify that the links created for your SEO strategy are active. In addition to negative SEO, this protects you from unscrupulous partners who do not respect the exchanges.
Also regularly monitor those that are generated naturally. If suspicious backlinks are generated, you will quickly see them and can use the Google tool to disavow them.
Avoid duplicate content
There are online tools to detect sites that use your content. You might be surprised by the results.
The best-known tool is Copyscape. Simply add your website or the body text of the article you want to check, and it will tell you if your content is duplicated elsewhere.
Secure your site
Hackers can penetrate your site through various loopholes. Be careful and follow some simple rules:
- Do security audits.
- Use a quality host. (I suggest you use Hostgator)
- Use strong passwords.
- Update your WordPress versions.
- Use updated plugins.
Monitor negative reviews
Monitor your online reviews and report abusive reviews. Fake reviews are usually easy to spot.
In order to anticipate such negative actions, encourage positive reviews from your customers to take up space and avoid fake reviews being the only ones visible.
Related topic: SEO Legends And Myths To Ignore In 2023
How to react in case of a penalty following a negative SEO attack?
Manual penalties
Manual penalties occur when a Google employee explores your site manually and finds practices contrary to the guidelines given for webmasters.
Once you have identified the issues mentioned and the reasons for the penalty, you can contact Google directly to request a reconsideration.
Explain what you have done to resolve the issue. Repeat this process until you get a positive response from them.
Algorithmic penalties
With algorithmic penalties, things are more complex.
Algorithm penalties are applied without a review process, so it’s up to you to fix the problem by identifying the causes.
Problems with algorithm updates are often well-documented, so you’ll probably know what you need to fix.
The initial sign that your site may have been affected by a penalty is a decrease in traffic. This can affect the entire site or specific pages, which is sometimes difficult to identify.
Hacking and other problems
For the other types of attacks mentioned, the losses will be short-lived. If there are no penalties, once the problems are corrected, your site should be back to its original position by the time the updates are done.