The entire SEO industry experienced a major transformation over the past two years. As a result, many online marketers have dramatically changed their strategies. Ranking high in Google for competitive keywords is not as easy as it was three years ago.
Because black hat SEO is harder and harder to execute, and less and less likely to deliver results, a new type of SEO has emerged called “negative SEO.”
This is a guide that will help you understand what negative SEO is and how you can protect your business from becoming a victim. If you are serious about building your brand online and keeping it safe, this is something you should not ignore.
What is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO refers to the practice of using black hat and unethical techniques to sabotage a competitor’s rankings in search engines. Negative SEO attacks can take a number of different forms:
- Hacking your website
- Building hundreds or thousands of spammy links to your website
- Copying your content and distributing it all over the internet
- Pointing links to your website using keywords like Viagra, poker online, and many others
- Creating fake social profiles and ruining your reputation online
- Removing the best backlinks your website has
Type of Negative SEO
- Link Farming: Pointing low-quality links to your website from sites created solely for the purpose of housing useless, spammy, unrelated links.
- Duplicate Content: Copying and pasting your content, and publishing it on multiple sites all over the internet is one of the easiest methods spammers use to penalize your site.
- Modifying Content: Running invisible scripts from the header or footer templates.
- Fake Social Media Profiles: Negative reviews published on social media can hurt you. Spammers often choose to attack through social media, creating accounts on Facebook or Twitter with a company’s name, and posting low-quality posts to ruin their reputation.
- De-indexing The Site: Changing your robots.txt file from the server to remove you from search.
- Forceful Crawling: Slowing down websites is an easy way for negative SEO practitioners to cause damage. By forcefully crawling the site, taxing the server load, and ultimately crashing the site, negative SEO practitioners can decrease or de-rank your site.
- Click Fraud: A specially programmed CTR bot looks for the site’s main keywords and branded terms, then clicks on the listing, only to quickly bounce back to the search engine request page. The site gets dropped once Google surmises the site’s owner may be trying to “game the system.”
- Adding Malware: If malware attacks your site, Google may warn users that “this site may be hacked” before forwarding, causing traffic to plummet.
How To Secure Your Website Against Negative SEO Attacks
Google’s assurances are not enough for the proactive web owner. Fortunately, there are several ways to proactively protect your website.
- Enable email notification Google Search Console: Now all information and issues pertaining to your website can be kept in the forefront of your mind. Once you see what is going on, you can employ more advanced strategies to prevent negative SEO, including: monitoring website backlinks, disavowing (or removing) suspicious backlinks, and securing your website from malware/hackers.
- Keep an eye on your backlinks: Online visibility management platforms like SEMrush help you monitor your backlinks through an email summary of changes. Building backlinks to negatively impact websites from low-quality websites is a favored tool of negative SEO practitioners.
- Closely watch your important backlinks: Again, a tool like SEMrush is invaluable. Mark your most important backlinks and ask to be alerted when they are removed. You can contact the webmasters of the sites and ask to have valuable backlinks restored, so you do not lose search status.
- Safeguard your website from hackers and malware: With all the high-profile hacks and costly data breaches in the news these days, it’s never been more important to bolster the security of your website against vicious malware attacks. Fortunately, there are easy and affordable steps you can take to do just that, such as:
- Using a strong administrator’s password
- Employing two-step authentication when available
- Maintaining an up-to-date website
- Installing security plugins (If you’re a HubSpot user, read about the tools built-in security here)
- Establishing an automatic backup system
- Look out for content thieves and copycats: Copyscape and Grammarly can help you find other copies of your content elsewhere on the Internet if they exist, as well as improve the quality of the writing on your site and avoid accidental plagiarism.
- Keep an eye on your social media mentions: Play an active role in social media administration through your social page dashboards. HubSpot, Hootsuite, and Social Mention offer social listening tools, so you are alerted whenever your name is mentioned on social media. When mentions are made, be sure you address any concerns directly and promptly to avoid bad publicity from spreading.
- Speed up your website loading time: Google Analytics Alerts send you emails when your website loading time slows down, so you can identify when and why it’s happening. You may need to enable caching, remove resource-hogging plugins or add-ons, optimize your image sizes, get rid of excess code, or take steps to block spammer activity.
FAQs – Negative SEO
1. What is Negative SEO?
Answer : Negative SEO, also sometimes called “Black Hat SEO,” involves the use of malicious tactics on your site to tarnish your reputation with Google and steal search engine rankings for important keywords to be used on a competitor’s site. In the past, negative SEO may have been as simple as hijacking your site with questionable banner ads. However, today’s negative SEO has become much more complex and sophisticated.
2. What are the various types of negative SEO?
Answer : Website hacking to modify your files to steal links, Content scraping, Keyword stuffing, Building toxic links to your site in the form of blog directory submission, forum posting, etc. are the various types of negative SEO.
3. What does Google say about Negative SEO?
Answer : Obviously, Google wants everyone to play by the rules. The online community of webmasters and marketers were shocked and concerned by Google Webmaster’s admission to the existence of Negative SEO back in 2012. Since then, Google Webmaster Matt Cutts reassures us: “In my experience, there’s a lot of people who talk about negative SEO, but very few people who actually try it. And, fewer still, who actually succeed.” He also went on to say that small businesses shouldn’t worry about being targeted for Negative SEO because it’s a tactic that is only reportedly used in very niche markets of bigger, highly-competitive businesses.
4. Is Google doing anything about Negative SEO?
Answer : Of course, Google is doing all sorts of work on the back-end but they can’t explain exactly what happens in each update, though, because the spammers would immediately set to work figuring out ways to exploit the new algorithms. The “link disavow” feature rolled out in October 2012 was Google’s public answer to concern about Negative SEO. This webmaster tool notifies webmasters of manual spam activity or unnatural links, and allows the option to deny backlinks from linking to their site and/or domain. By addressing the problem at the root cause through a simple text file of URL listings, Google makes it easier to keep tabs on fraudulent activity. Yet, the Webmaster Central Blog also wants you to remain confident in their ability to reward the good sites and punish the bad. “The vast majority of sites do not need to use this tool in any way,” they clarified.
The Bottom Line
When we talk about SEO, the First thing that comes to our mind is On-Page SEO, Off Page SEO, Technical SEO, and Local SEO. But in the initial stage, newcomers do not know the techniques of SEO. These techniques ( White Hat SEO, Black Hat SEO, Gray Hat SEO, Negative SEO ) can rank your website in the search engine’s first page or first position. But be careful about the wrong techniques. These techniques can also harm your website ranking or permanently ban on search engines. So before you get started using SEO make sure to read all about SEO techniques.
Negative SEO happens. The best you can do, as a business website owner, is to stay informed on the different ways in which it occurs, remain vigilant, and use the latest tools to protect yourself.