What is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO is the unethical practice of deliberately harming a competitor’s search engine rankings. This is typically achieved through tactics like link spamming, which aims to reduce a website’s authority in Google’s rankings.
While Google representatives claim that negative SEO attacks can be safely ignored, as Google can identify and discount low-quality, spammy links, many in the SEO community remain doubtful. This scepticism stems from Google’s known ability to penalise websites for manipulative tactics and from evidence of certain negative SEO campaigns achieving success.
Importance of Securing Your Website from Negative SEO
Although search engines like Google have implemented safeguards to reduce the impact of negative SEO, they do not provide a complete guarantee that your site is fully protected.
Negative SEO can have several harmful effects:
1. Drop in Organic Search Traffic
A common negative SEO tactic is creating spammy backlinks to a competitor’s website, which Google may interpret as link manipulation. This could lead to the site being demoted in search rankings.
Additionally, attackers may use irrelevant or spammy anchor texts to link to the website, weakening its topical relevance or associating it with undesirable search terms. In extreme cases, the site could face penalties, even resulting in its removal from Google’s index.
The silver lining is that negative SEO attacks are often excessively aggressive and can be distinguished from legitimate link-building.
2. Damaged Reputation
Negative SEO can also target local search by flooding your Google business profile with fake negative reviews, damaging your brand’s reputation and potentially lowering your local search rankings.
3. Hacked Website
Website hacking is a common method used in black-hat SEO – If attackers manage to hack your website, even briefly, they could alter important files like the robots.txt, set pages to “noindex,” or add spammy links, all of which can harm your rankings and credibility.
