Negative Seo
What is negative SEO? Attempts to Sabotage Rival Websites
Negative SEOrefers to unethical and illegal practices. These practices are the basis of a competitor's website lowering search engine rankings goals. These tactics are typically used with the intention of harming the competitor's SEO efforts and improving the attacker's position in their own search engine results. Negative SEO attempts to manipulate search engines' principles of trust and relevance, and can have serious consequences.
Such activities are contrary to the guidelines of search engines and include a significant drop in rankings or being completely de-indexed (de-indexed) from search results Penalties (penalties) can lead to. Search engines are constantly improving their algorithms, trying to detect and prevent such manipulations.
Common Negative SEO Practices:
Some of the methods commonly used in negative SEO attacks are:
- Creating Lots of Low-Quality Backlinks:
- This is one of the most common negative SEO tactics. Thousands of low-quality backlinks are sent to the rival site, irrelevant, spammed, or created by bots.
- Search engines perceive such links as “unnatural” and manipulative. This can cause the target site to receive a spam penalty.
- Example: Sudden and high volume of links from gambling sites, irrelevant forums with Chinese characters, or blogs created with automated tools.
- Scraping and Duplicating Content:
- Taking content from a competitor's website without permission and posting it on other sites (especially low-quality sites).
- This makes it difficult for search engines to determine which content is original and can lead to the problem of “duplicate content”, lowering the ranking of the competitor.
- Website Hacking and Defacing:
- Changing the appearance of the site by infiltrating the competitor's website (defacing) or placing malicious codes.
- Such attacks can directly affect the ranking or cause the site to be flagged by search engines due to a vulnerability.
- Creating Fake Comments and Spam Social Signals:
- Posting fake, negative reviews about a competitor's products or services (on platforms such as Google My Business, Trustpilot, etc.)
- Trying to damage the reputation of the site by generating spammed or negative social signals (likes, shares, comments) through fake accounts on social media platforms.
- Click Fraud:
- By repeatedly clicking on the competitor's paid ads (PPC), their budgets are depleted quickly and reduce the efficiency of their advertising campaigns.
- Crawl Budget Exhaustion:
- Overloading the site's server with a large number of unnecessary requests or bot traffic, preventing search engines from crawling the pages properly.
Preventing and Combating Negative SEO:
- Regular Connection Inspection: Regularly check your profile in Google Search Console or other SEO tools (Ahrefs, Semrush). Watch for abnormal or suspicious connection spikes.
- Reject Links (Disavow): Use Google Disavow Tool to prevent them from negatively impacting your site by reporting suspicious and harmful backlinks to Google.
- Website Security: Use strong passwords, security plugins, and regular backups to keep your site secure.
- Content Monitoring: Track whether your content is being copied without permission (with tools such as copyscape).
- Google Search Console Notifications: Check if your site receives manual penalties in Google Search Console.
- Quick Response: Take quick action when you spot a negative SEO attack and report it to search engines along with evidence.
Example:
A competitor can create hundreds of spammed backlinks to your site in order to punish your website by Google. These links often come from low-quality, irrelevant websites and are artificially created. This is designed to affect the reliability and performance of your site Negative SEO is the form. If you notice this, you can prevent damage to your site by disavowing these links via Google Search Console.
