What is Negative SEO?

Search engine optimization has been a crucial part of marketing on the internet. Firstly, SEO is a way of making a search engine rank your website higher than others so that your webpage shows up at the top of the list. However, there is a thing called negative SEO, which means companies make their competitors look less appealing to the search engine and their competitors are then ranked lower. Negative SEO is mostly used by bigger companies that want to get rid of their competitors.

There have been numerous cases of negative SEO affecting a website. One example of this would be an incident that involved WP Bacon. Over the span of a couple days, their website had tons of links to “porn movie,” and their reputation was gone for a while. Although they were able to recover, their website had a dramatic decrease in visits during those few days. An impact that resulted in loss of customers, reputation, and branding.

Examples of Websites being affected by Negative SEO

“There’s nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking,” Google stated in 2003.

This is obviously incorrect as we see there are cases of negative SEO. There are examples of negative SEO and many with serious attacks. However, going off a blog by Marie Haynes, the majority of the reported negative SEO cases on google end up not being negative SEO. The few cases that are negative SEO, always seem to have a pattern to them.

The first example is an attack on Kinsta.com. They’ve also written their own blog on how their own website was attacked. In this example, Kinsta took matters into their own hands with a couple of new tools in 2012. They managed to clean up the negative SEO attack with methods I will cover later in this blog. Even though they managed to fight off the negative SEO attack, the damage was already done.

There are numerous other cases that involve people finding out that they’re being attacked by negative SEO. On another blog by David McSweeney, June 11, 2018, he quotes many representatives of companies that have been attacked by negative SEO. Most of these people don’t even realize it until they check their email, or online traffic.

Once they saw that there was a steep decline of visits, they dug a bit further and found out that they were under attack. For the most part, these attacks can be easily reversed, and their websites will return to normal. However, there are some cases that are out of your control. With Google assisting the victim, website recovery has sped up dramatically over the past couple of years. Google has been getting better and better at detecting possible negative SEO attacks and warning the potential victim.

In November 2017, there was a ton of negative SEO attacks on many websites which caused most of their rankings to fall. We know that negative SEO attacks can be serious when they’re experienced at what they’re doing.

According to raventools, people won’t even know what hit them, literally. The drop in visitation could simply be a coincidence. Although this could be the case, your website is still taking the fall from these people. Some website owners report that they would have random links that would appear on their website, but they wouldn’t lead anywhere. They were broken links that people were trying to mess around with.

How Negative SEO works on search engines

Most attempts at negative SEO don’t work out, but negative SEO can work in some scenarios. Negative SEO attacks work because they exploit the ranking system that most search engines have in place. Negative SEO can be a real threat to some websites, but luckily Google will be able to handle most of it automatically. Through Google’s algorithm, there are several factors that either boost or decrease your ranking. Ranking could determine whether a website is placed on the first, second, third, or last page on a search engine.

One way negative SEO works would be by duplicating content. Backlink profiles are also an important part of a website. By creating “low quality links” to a website, they are effectively decreasing the website’s ranking. Spammy links are also another sneaky method of lowering one’s website ranking.

There are many more attempts at negative SEO, but they cannot be found because they are too minor/unsuccessful. One of the reasons why negative SEO is hard for Google to get rid of is that Google can’t tell who posted the spammy links. Since Google or any other web browser can’t determine the cause of it, the website gets penalized. This is the whole idea behind negative SEO. By using loopholes, they make it seem like the website is the one making a mess, which lowers the website’s ranking.

What is Negative SEO

The goal of a negative SEO attack is to lower a specific website’s ranking, by using unorthodox methods. There are numerous ways someone can attack a website, but through negative SEO, it uses the system’s algorithm against them. Negative SEO attacks Google’s algorithms’ weaknesses. Factors on which Google grades a website on, is what negative SEO uses to attack. However, Google has been getting better at determining which links are bad, “spammy”, or good.

At one point, people believed that it was impossible to reduce your website ranking , but now have realized that there is such a thing as negative SEO. Negative SEO is the act of sabotaging a website by lowering their ranking. Negative SEO is seen by some as illegal. It is not an actual offense that people can be charged with, but it is considered unethical to partake in negative SEO. “Black hat,” is a term that means that something could be illegal or unethical.

The list goes on of Black Hat SEO, as there are many ways to damage a website’s reputation and visibility. Some methods that I recognized are, clickbait, copied content, irrelevant keywords, and invisible text links. Negative SEO is a broad term that covers all of these methods of making someone else’s website ranking be lowered. It can be beneficial for people who own websites to regularly check to see if your website is being affected by negative SEO.

How to Resist Negative SEO Attacks

If you’re unlucky enough to have to deal with one of these types of attacks, there are a couple ways of fighting back. Normally, these attacks aren’t a problem, but there are times where the owner of the website needs to act. For example, the way to fight against link spams is to “disavow” them. Disavowing links tells Google that these links do not belong to the website. This way, the website won’t be penalized for the harmful backlinks that aren’t supposed to be there. There is a thing called a “Spam Score,” which makes things easier to know what to disavow. Google states that they’re able to “ignore” the majority of these attacks, but if they were able to, why is negative SEO still a thing? There are a couple of links that are able to split through the security of Google every once in a while.

Also, it is not a bad idea to be checking in on your website every month or week depending on how big your website is. Google will be able to alert the website owner if they think that they’re a target of a negative SEO attack. Google will be able to warn the owner around the time of the attack. This is a good way to tell when the website gains a mysterious backlink that could be harmful to the website. Being on top of these alerts is a good way to prevent the majority of the damage from happening, by stopping it early.

Not only can negative SEO include adding backlinks to your website, they can also remove them. However, the owner of the website will probably not want a random backlink added to their website. All of this goes back to checking up on your website every now and then. To protect backlinks, it might be best to attempt to communicate with the “webmasters.” Less subtle attacks found be the website being hacking. Before this happens, there are several things that can prevent your website from hackers/malware. Going off of the blog above by Neil Patel, it is best to add layers of protection. One thing that could help is to create backup files so that if something were to happen to your website, you would still have a copy.

If the negative SEO attack is a bit too much for you and your company, there are always people out there that will be able to help you. For example, there are companies that specialize in fighting off negative SEO using tools such as Kerboo or Link Detox. There are many more tools/people that can help you in your fight against negative SEO. So, if you are feeling overwhelmed and don’t know what to do, you can reach out to one of these companies so that they can figure out your situation for you.

Best practices of “Positive SEO”

There are many methods of using negative SEO, but there is a thing called positive SEO as well. Positive SEO is when the owner tries to promote their website by making it be more visible to viewers. One method of positive SEO includes having keywords on the webpage. Keywords, things that viewers will search up, will be ranked high if your website has those words and close to the front of your website.

Knowing what your customers/visitors want from your website is key. If you make a website without a goal in mind, then they probably will have a tough time looking through your website. There is a method of positive SEO that involves getting an SEO audit on the website. To sum it up, an audit is when you or a group of people examine the data relating to your website and visitors. By analyzing your own website, you will be able find out what can be improved

Takeaway on Negative SEO

There are many ways for other people to attack websites. Negative SEO is mainly used by competing companies or businesses. While they might not be the most ethical methods, this won’t stop people from attacking other people’s websites. These attacks can cause serious damage to one’s reputation and visibility online, but there are also many ways to protect yourself against these kinds of attacks. Careful measures can be taken to prevent any of this from happening as well. Remember, it is always better to prevent than treat the problem. You probably won’t be able to rely on Google or any web browser to completely take care of it for now, so if something fishy happens, take action.

Even better hire a top SEO company that can help monitor such attacks!