Negative SEO

Negative SEO harms competitors: Spam backlinks, duplicate content, or hacks are intended to trigger penalties/deindexing. Detect via monitoring (visibility, link profile, Search Console) and respond: clean up, disavow, request, security.

For every method to bring websites, online shops, and content to the top of search results through search engine optimization, there is a spam technique that is usually used for strong manipulation of the SERPs. Since search engines fiercely resist these actions and can, in the worst case, penalize a website by excluding it from the index, most webmasters and SEO specialists have abandoned what is known as Black Hat SEO. However, over the years, what is known as negative SEO has established itself in certain circles. Here, too, spam measures or similar tactics are used. However, they are not intended to push one's own website but to accuse the competition of "violations of webmaster guidelines." The result: Through spamming, bad neighborhood, or duplicate content, websites are penalized and, in the worst case, even de-indexed. This means the webmaster must clean and rebuild the website, which costs a lot of time and money. In the meantime, other websites can intercept visitors, generate revenue, and gain rankings in the SERPs. Although the search engine Google officially states that websites do not lose rankings or get de-indexed due to negative SEO, there have been a few examples nonetheless.

Sudden loss of visibility?

If you are an SEO or content manager, you are probably familiar with this scenario: you go to work in the morning and first check the visibility index of your websites. A routine task that can hold sudden shock moments when the curve rapidly declines. The visibility suddenly collapses, causing revenues to exponentially decrease. Now quick action is needed: Is negative SEO to blame? Find out what it is, how to identify Black Hat actions, and what you can do about it.

What is Negative SEO?

In short, Negative SEO is exactly the opposite of search engine optimization. While search engine optimization involves various on-page and off-page optimization measures to ensure that a site ranks high in organic search results, negative measures are taken that aim to degrade websites, for example, by Google. In the worst case, negative measures can even lead to exclusion from the search engine index.

Now it is clear that no one voluntarily takes these steps. Attacks usually come from outside – for example by hackers who trigger Negative SEO. Shop operators might also take steps to harm the competition. Apart from the fact that it is illegal to deliberately carry out harmful search engine optimization, the energy spent on it should rather be invested sensibly in one's own positive SEO measures. So – don’t be seduced by the dark side of the force!

Important: Negative SEO should never be confused with poor on-page and off-page optimization of a website! Nevertheless, negative SEO can essentially include all measures that violate the search engines' webmaster guidelines. Although not every procedure can be applied from the outside, some methods are usually sufficient to cause lasting damage to a website. Link spamming is relatively simple, where an enormous number of backlinks from harmful environments (e.g., link farms) are placed on a website. It becomes particularly critical if these links come from a bad neighborhood, primarily from websites related to pornography, loans, and illegal gambling. Duplicate content also leads to difficulties with search engines. In numerous executions, this method is called content scraping.

Examples of negative SEO

Negative SEO has many faces. Get to know some measures so that you can quickly recognize them in the future:

Hacking:

Hacking is both laborious but also effective. If an attacker has hacked into your own website, they have an easy game: pages with harmful content can be published, links can be set to noindex and nofollow, and changes can easily be made to the robots.txt. Hacking the robots.txt is an attack to prevent Google from crawling. In the worst case, your website is hacked so that you can no longer access your own backend.

Spamming:

Through "Bad Neighbourhood," links with deliberately over-optimized link texts are set here en masse via link farms so that the respective website is penalized by Google.

Damage to reputation

This can be done, for example, by deliberately googling the name of a company in connection with negatively connoted words such as "fraud" or "counterfeiting" multiple times. Fake press releases could also be used as a means. Also possible: using an anchor text related to the company in connection with fraudulent websites as a linking URL.

Fake Link Removal Request:

In the name of a website operator to be harmed, this method involves requesting the deletion of existing, mostly valuable links.

Duplicar contenido spam:

Here, existing content from the target page is copied and published elsewhere in the same way, with the aim that the source page is penalized for duplicate content. This technique is also called content scraping.

How can one recognize negative SEO?

Now that you know what methods exist to harm a website, you are surely wondering how to recognize negative actions. It is very important to have regular reports created for your website. By monitoring important KPIs such as visibility, domain popularity, or link profile, conclusions can already be drawn. If this is neglected, it might even happen that negative SEO is noticed very late.

A sudden drop in ranking is often a very clear indication of an attack. Can a Google Core Update be ruled out? If so, Negative SEO is even likely.

Why is negative SEO so "dangerous"?

On one hand, negative SEO ensures that one's efforts and financial investments in optimizing a website for search engines were in vain or cost twice as much because the website needs to be rebuilt. If the URL is "burned," meaning it is no longer optimizable, a completely new project must be started. This costs a lot of time, which ultimately results in customer and revenue loss for the webmaster, the company, or the trader. On the other hand, and this is usually the insidious part of negative SEO, those responsible are difficult to identify and hold accountable. Essentially, one can try to intervene early, for example, by "disavowing" links through Google or contacting the operators of spam sites to have backlinks removed. Moreover, one can try to counteract with high-quality and well-linked content.

Particularly at risk are young websites that do not yet enjoy high trust with search engines and have few backlinks. Here, it is easy to set up spam links and carry out other negative SEO measures.

What to do against Black Hats?

The process of elimination finally points out where the problem lies exactly. Also, learn how to address these issues step by step:

Manual punishment

In the Google Search Console, it is very easy to check whether a website operator has received a manual penalty. If this is the case, the problem should be checked and resolved. Afterwards, a reconsideration request is submitted, after which the site is manually reviewed again and, in the best case scenario, the penalty is lifted.

Website hacked

If you can no longer access your backend or the Search Console shows something under "Security issues," the case is clear: hackers were at work. The first step should be to temporarily quarantine the website, meaning take it offline, to prevent further damage. Next, harmful pages or other changes must be removed. Finally, all passwords need to be changed. It may also be worth considering a review of the host in the event of an attack and not cutting corners here.

Check backlink profile

With the Search Console, you can also fundamentally check your own link profile. If there is an unnaturally strong increase without the website owner's intervention, this should already raise suspicion. If low-quality links, such as from link farms, appear, they should be disavowed using a request through Google Disavow.

Solicitud de eliminación de enlace falso

Months, perhaps years of work have been invested in building backlinks, only for someone to come and destroy this work through a link removal request. The attacker creates an email address in the name of the target company and requests changes to links, for example, under the guise of altering a link strategy. Untrained eyes can easily overlook that the email address and the request are fake. If valuable links are removed, the link profile can be significantly weakened. The only way to address this is to hire an agency to check the links or handle it yourself.

Duplicate Content Spam

In duplicate content spam, other websites copy your content and publish it one-to-one. By regularly checking the content, copying sites can be quickly identified. After identifying the duplicate content, there are two options:

Contact Google and request the removal of the content
Contact the host of the fake site and ask for deletion.
Of course, you should not rule out legal action if you can prove the authorship of your content.

Recognize and combat negative SEO

Whether it's harmful links, duplicate content, or website hacking – now you know what might be behind the sudden drop in your website or your clients' ranking. An important takeaway from this is to monitor your pages well and get regular reports so that, if the worst happens, the problem can be quickly identified and addressed.