Negative SEO: do you know what it is, can you recognize it if you are a victim of it? Do you know how to defend yourself?
Optimizing your website and getting it to the first page on Google is a no-holds-barred battle, and sometimes it can happen that the losers, your competitors, do not digest the defeat.
In this case you can become a victim of negative SEO, or negative SEO in English, which you can recognize by one or more of these signs:
- Suddenly your site loads pages very, very slowly.
- The site crashes while browsing.
- The site receives links from unusual and unexpected sites, usually from Asian sites.
- You get a flood of negative reviews.
As a result you are losing positions on the Google search results page.
What is negative SEO?
Negative SEO in a nutshell is a deliberate misuse of SEO techniques with the goal of sabotaging a website and bringing it down in search engine rankings.
In SEO circles they are also known by the term seo black hat in reference to the old western movies where the hero had the white hat and the villain the black one.
Thus, negative SEO is a set of aggressive tactics that aim to deceive Google and other search engines.
But, In essence, the current technological evolution of search engines, and specifically Google, makes them take notice by penalizing the site under attack.
Unfortunately, it is not that difficult to put in place a black hat attack on a site and make it look bad in Google’s eyes.
Types of negative SEO attacks
If an unfair competitor has targeted you, there are several negative SEO tactics they might use, let’s look at some of the most well-known ones.
- Hacking a website: if a hacker manages to gain access to your website, they can do big, big damage. One of the worst practices is to redirect your website to sites that have nothing to do with your business or worse to spam or pornographic sites. Think about these when planning the security of your business website.
- Creating spam links to a site: one of the most popular methods is to use a bot, an automated program, that starts spamming links to your site in comments and forums. A bot is one of the cheapest and most difficult to stop systems for a perfect negative SEO attack.
- Stealing content from a Web site and creating duplicates: if a hacker has access to your site, he could also duplicate it and create some sort of spam scheme to damage your content.
- Creating fake reviews about a business: especially for local businesses that have reviews as a strength, a local negative SEO attack could use review sites like Google to bombard your business with fake, negative reviews.
- Removal of your site’s best backlinks: in borderline cases, hackers contact website owners with links to your site and posing as you, ask them to remove or change the link. This also happens.
How real is the danger?
Negative SEO is a real danger and can destroy weeks, months and years of work and the investment that got you on the first page of search engines-don’t underestimate the threat.
Although it is increasingly difficult to deploy effective black hat tactics, thanks in part to SEO specialists and consultants, you can always encounter unfair competitors willing to do anything to make you lose search engine positions and visibility.
Reasonably though, the chances of suffering a negative SEO attack are quite small.
If you encounter anomalies in the performance of your website there may also be other explanations, however, you should not underestimate these signs and take effective preventive measures to protect yourself from these negative SEO attacks.
Let’s see what you can do to protect yourself.
How can you protect your website from negative SEO?
Check traffic spikes with Google Analytics
If you experience a spike in traffic on your website there can be two reasons:
- It is justified: you have a marketing campaign going on that is working, a pay-per-click campaign or a product that is doing particularly well, or even your content is resonating with your audience and it is all positive.
- It’s not justified: none of that is happening. In this case, a totally unexpected spike in traffic should set off a powerful and obvious red flag.
One of the most commonly used black hat tactics involves spamming low-quality blogs, forums and comments with the link of the website you want to penalize.
The damage is done when Google scans the links on the site under attack because it discovers a number of links that come from spam or low-quality sites.
With the use of Google Analytics, however, you can check the traffic you receive from referrals, SEO, social, pay per click and all other channels.
Check traffic for what your marketing is failing to justify.
In the Google Analytics referrals report, you can check exactly where your traffic is coming from and assess are you a victim of a negative SEO attack.
I have written a basic guide to Google Analytics that you might be interested in.
Check traffic slumps
Google Analytics is also your ally if you experience an unexpected traffic slump.
Through the option Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels and click on Organic Search you can compare traffic with a previous period to get an overview, if you see a major drop you may have a problem.
You can also use SEO tools like Semrush for example to do a check from an SEO perspective of your website.
I have written a guide for Semrush that you might find useful.
Look for duplicate content
Good SEO bases its foundation on good content, quality content.
The best websites have unique, quality content that is useful to readers, which is why Google rewards them by ranking them high on the search results page. Likewise, Google does not approve low-quality or worse, duplicate content.
One negative SEO tactic is to duplicate recent content from the site under attack and copy it to dozens of junk domains. If Google indexes one of the junk pages after the original content, it loses value to Google by becoming duplicate content.
There are tools on the net such as Copyscape to check that your content is not duplicated around the web.
Contact the webmaster if you find your duplicate content on other sites, asking for immediate removal. You can also contact Google and claim ownership of your content.
Check your site’s links
Another reason that leads to penalization is the acquisition of a large amount of links to your site in a short time which makes this activity unnatural, in the eyes of search engines.
It is normal for the number of links to your site to grow over time as people learn about your business, however, it is a gradual and steady growth. A sudden growth in your backlinks is almost always suspicious and should alert you.
You can check the quantity and quality of your backlinks with tools such as Ahrefs and Moz’s Link Explorer .
You can subsequently ask Google to disallow spam links to remove them from the web.
Check your reviews
Negative reviews drive customers away, this is a fact, this makes it a tool in the hands of those who want to harm you with negative SEO.
If you have received an unwarranted string of negative reviews you may be the victim of a competitor or disgruntled customer.
My advice is to always respond to negative reviews by showing your company’s willingness to fix the problem.
However, when you are a victim of negative Seo strategies you can report to Google and other review sites that you are being targeted by fake reviews.
Site efficiency
Is the site slower than usual in loading pages or is it crashing?
If you notice that your website’s performance has deteriorated from usual, your website may be under negative SEO attack.
Hackers can in some cases, heavily slow down the operational speed of a website with continuous scans in order to deliberately slow it down and frustrate customers’ browsing.
Conclusions
SEO gives you the opportunity to grow your business in defiance of the competition, and sometimes the competition can be unscrupulous, which is why you should always be on the lookout for negative SEO.
Black hat tactics are still effective when it comes to sabotaging someone’s site although the damage can be mitigated by keeping a constant eye on the situation, detecting attacks early on and adopting corrective strategies.
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