Negative SEO is a technique used to harm and damage the web positioning of the competition. Today we inform you of everything you should know about this practice and how to confront it in case of suffering an attack.
WHAT IS NEGATIVE SEO?
Negative SEO consists of a series of techniques aimed at the competition’s website in order to damage its web positioning and online reputation.
That is to say, that the practitioners of these techniques, instead of seeking to increase their positions, intend to harm those of the competition regardless of the damage and the losses they may cause. One of the very popular brand of logo design industry soda logos design provider had been hit by negative SEO from one of their competitor and they faced millions of loss.
WHY IS IT DONE?
SEO as such is a very profitable practice for those pages that are positioned in the top positions for keywords with many searches, therefore if there is any possibility of making money, many people will have no qualms about carrying out harmful practices for competition if they can benefit from it.
If we coldly analyze the success data of both Positive and Negative SEO, the second in the short term is simpler, faster and cheaper.
However, do not be fooled by appearances and “good” results, since in the long run it ends up harming those who practice this type of technique.
WHEN DID IT ARISE?
Negative SEO has been present in the world of web positioning for many years, but it was not until the “Penguin” update of 2012 that it took real importance.
The update “Penguin” was a before and after in the algorithm of Google, since it began to penalize web pages that over-optimized the Seo Off Page, that is, external factors that do not belong to the main page.
That was the main reason why Negative SEO took such strength from 2012, since external factors can be manipulated without the consent of the affected website. A person can create a page with a dubious reputation and generate a link to their competition, as well as buy hundreds or thousands of junk links to the competition website, achieving a penalty by Google that can even de-index the website .
EXAMPLES OF NEGATIVE SEO
There are many ways to damage the rankings of the competition, but the most used by Negative SEO practitioners are the following:
- Spam
- Make negative comments about the competition on blogs or opinion websites.
- Send SPAM links to the web so that Google believes that Linkbuilding is aggressive and penalizes the page.
- DDoS attacks: The latter is not a negative SEO attack itself. What is sought with this kind of attacks is to saturate the server with too many simultaneous requests and make it collapse. If Google goes through the web and sees it out of operation, it will end up by de-indexing the website.
WHAT CAN I DO TO PROTECT MYSELF?
The algorithm of Google every day is more intelligent, and is currently able to detect quite well the majority of negative SEO attacks. When Google detects a massive amount of links with anchor text that have nothing to do with the subject of the user does not usually take them into account. Despite this, Google is not perfect and sometimes it is not able to detect these practices and ends up penalizing the attacked website.
To avoid this being your case, what you do is to register your website in Google Search Console, and take the habit of monitoring your portfolio of links, observing those that have nothing to do with your website or that you just do not have created you, as well as detect strong drops in traffic that may indicate that you are being attacked.
Once the attack is detected, it would be ideal to contact the owners of the websites that have linked you and ask them to remove the link, but given that they will be automated links and there are probably hundreds or thousands this can be an expensive practice, and even unviable.
To solve this fact, Google offers Disavow a tool that allows us to send Google the links that we detect as garbage.
Day after day, experts in web positioning work to combat against Negative SEO, and we hope that in future updates Google will completely eradicate this bad practice.
Mordan Sean:
The author of above content is a professional digital marketing who has assisted many brands in increasing their ROI. Currently, he is associated with SK Web Designing Solutions a leading Custom Logo Design Services provider in the United States.
