Negative SEO is a practice of Black Hat SEO , i.e. that branch of unethical SEO banned by Google guidelines , which aims to bury the positioning on search engines and the reputation of a competitor website.
In fact, there are practices, called Black Hat SEO techniques, which are used to manipulate the positioning on search engines . Since Google manages to intercept these practices and penalize the sites that use them, it has now become a weapon that some websites turn towards their competitors.
And what does Google thinkGoogle claims to know how to recognize and ignore them. In fact, John Mueller said about negative SEO:
“In general we do automatically take these into account and we try to… ignore them automatically when we see them happening. For the most part, I suspect that it works fairly well. I see very few people with actual issues around that. So I think that’s mostly working well.”
But the truth is not quite like that . If we don’t act in time, actually, the site can really be seriously damaged.
But there is a positive note: intercepting negative SEO attacks on our website is quite simple – even if sometimes it takes time to be able to recover the lost positioning – and in the course of this article we will also see more closely how to do it .
How negative SEO works
But how does negative SEO work?
Let’s say that one of your competitors notices your website, sees that it is growing and positioning itself well. Let’s also say that this frustrated competitor can’t stand the competition and wants to see your site disappear into the abyss of Google or even penalized by BigG.
And here begins the attack.
( But then, wouldn’t it be more profitable for both of us to collaborate instead of attacking each other? I can’t understand these things, I swear
There are different types of negative SEO attacks , such as the most classic one which consists in creating toxic backlinks pointing to your site. Of course, when we talk about attacks we are not talking about a handful of spam links, which are usually quite normal for a website.
We are talking about thousands and thousands of toxic links . These are India Phone Number List the real problem and can very negatively impact your website’s SEO , even leading to it being penalized by Google.
So let’s see what types of negative SEO we can incur.
Types of negative SEO
There are dozens of ways to penalize a website for a bad SEO attack. Here are the most common:
- Creating duplicate content
- Hacking attack
- Creating toxic backlinks
- Posting fake reviews
- Removing positive backlinks.
Let’s see them all in more detail.
Creating duplicate content
One negative SEO technique that is used to harm a website is duplicate content .
As you well know, duplicate content is not well viewed by Google which tends to penalize it.
But isn’t that a counterproductive technique? Google should penalize Numbers Lists the copying site, not the copied one, right?
Er… not exactly.
To this day, Google doesn’t know – or perhaps doesn’t care to know – which content is the real original . And therefore it tends to consider the original which is indexed first.
As a result, you can safely run the risk of being penalized if your content is the original one and instead seeing copied content rewarded just because it was indexed before yours.
Sad but true.
