Negative SEO is a real threat. And as such, Google does its best to prevent spammers and the effectiveness of black hat SEO. However, there is another form of threat that is increasingly getting popular with spammers - Negative SEO. Negative SEO is when someone deliberately sets out to sabotage another site’s SEO score to remove or lower their SEO rankings. It’s something that can happen to anyone. If you are wondering what negative SEO techniques you should watch out for, read ahead.
Off-Page Negative SEO
Off-page negative SEO is basically an attack trying to ruin a website’s backlink profile. As you know, in SEO, building valuable, high-quality backlinks contribute significantly to a website’s SEO ranking. Here are some Off-Page SEO Techniques you should watch out for.
1.) Spammy Links and Backlink removal
One way to effectively damage someone’s SEO score is to build hundreds, if not thousands, of spammy links that can get a website penalized by Google. This usually happens in one of two ways:
Link farms - The most commonly used strategy in a Negative SEO is using link farms like PBN (Private Blog Network) which is a network of websites made for link building. They create some low-quality and spammy links that will lead to your website. This makes Google flag the site as a website potentially involved in spam activity. The higher of spam score of the links the more your site will be involved in penalty listing.
SEO Software - This is where attacker point and target your moneysite with a lot of links per day, and they indexed the links with 24 hours. They will build massive of links and analyze your page or keywords and they're going to rank the keywords that you're focusing until you will get hit with penalty without any idea.
Backlink removal - Another thing that can happen is having your best backlinks removed. It’s straightforward but nevertheless harmful. The spammers will email webmasters, claiming to be you, to ask them to remove your links.
2.) Scrapped Content Distribution
This is another sneaky way of lowering SEO rankings. What happens is that scammers will copy your content and distribute it all over the internet. This takes advantage of the Google’s Panda updates. Your original content will most probably be punished for copied content, even though it’s not the case.
This scenario can happen if another lower ranked website wants to buff their content using other people’s material. The other, more malicious intention is probably a Negative SEO attack aimed to scrape your content before Google crawls it, resulting in your site getting punished.
3.) Hacked Website
The worst, most dangerous technique of Negative SEO is website hacking and malware virus. If someone really wants to do damage on your SEO ranking in a big way, this is how they’ll do it. Hackers can go into your website, and truth be told, you might not even notice them. What will they do? They’ll go to your site and will target pages that don't regularly access and change some things about your SEO, including:
Removing images and links on your pages.
Replacing your content and planting low-quality duplicate content in its place.
Adding disturbing and inappropriate content on your site.
Replacing links or adding them with ones of their web pages
Drive traffic from your website to unethical pages
Altering your HTML, so you can’t notice these changes
This can happen particularly more often to websites who have a considerable archive of content and those who post frequently. You can also be a target if your website hasn’t been monitored in a while because these are the kinds of websites that are easier for hackers to access and successfully alter.
The Takeaway
Negative SEO shouldn’t be taken lightly. It’s a genuine threat to your website. Remember, the competition is first when it comes to landing on the first page results of search engines. Everyone could have the agenda of ruining your SEO ranking. The key to prevent this is to monitor your site regularly, check inbound and outbound links, check your Google webmaster tool for new links or use 3rd party software such as Semrush, Ahrefs or Majestic and watch out for the things written on this guide.
Matt Cutts addresses questions about negative SEO, check the video below:
Other Related Blogs:
https://searchengineland.com/6-types-negative-seo-watch-272881
https://moz.com/blog/preparing-for-negative-seo
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/04/20/negative-seo