All of you must be fairly familiar with SEO by now, but have
you heard of negative SEO?
It used to be just a dark rumour online, with many
doubting it was even possible… But Google confirmed it’s possibility in 2007,
and those who work in the SEO industry today have confirmed it’s easier than ever.
Negative SEO refers to someone carrying out a smear campaign
on your website, using SEO against you.
Just to clarify, your web company will do a million and one
things to your website in the name of optimising it for search engines, but
negative SEO is something anyone can maliciously do to your website... from anywhere. They don’t
need login details, server information or anything else, just the website
address.
There are a series of rules and guidelines that your web
company will follow in order to make sure your SEO boosts your site rather than
making it look spammy, but negative SEO attacks essentially break all of these
rules to make you look like the ultimate Bond villain of the internet...
Now that you’re good and scared, you can relax a bit,
because not everyone out there is doing negative SEO. The fear of getting
caught seems to keep it in check, but you should always be vigilant.
Do Online Marketing Businesses use Negative SEO ?
If they do, it’s not the sort of thing they would advertise.
Those individuals or businesses that will use negative SEO against your competitors often promise fast results. They’re the ones that say they’ll get you to page
one of Google within a week, or that they can double your web traffic in a day.
But these kind of results are not sustainable. Your website may improve for a
week, but once Google catches wind of your bad practice, you’ll be blacklisted.
Those who use negative
SEO don’t offer long-term, healthy improvements for your website that will
future-proof it against upcoming Google updates. And so in the end whatever
they do on your behalf will have a long-term negative effect.
It’s like popping Pro Plus for weeks instead of just getting
a good night’s sleep.
Tactics of Negative SEO
It can be hard to fully understand a concept like negative
SEO without actual examples, so we’ll outline a few measures a successful negative SEO campaign employed. I would stress at this point that you should not
attempt to employ these tactics yourself. A rookie attempting this won’t have
the necessary skills and know-how to cover their tracks, and even a pro can get
caught and punished. It is not illegal, but you could hurt your business.
A user claiming to be the owner of a successful negative SEO company posted on a forum in 2012 outlining what he did to bring down a
competitors website. It took up to a year to get the competitor removed from
Google for all their keywords, and the website still appears to be absent from
Google page 1 today, two years later.
Some of the tactics he mentioned include;
- Paid Linking.
He created thousands of links that would point to the targeted website for each of their keywords. Backlinks like this are generally good, but if you’re getting 1000 a day it looks mighty suspicious. - Stealing Content.
He copied content from the targeted website and posted it on loads of blogs and other websites, to make it look like the original site was the thief. - Fake reviews.
He added numerous five star reviews on multiple websites, making it look like the targeted business was creating them. It took 40 fake reviews in 2 months to get the website removed from Google Reviews - Slowing down the targeted website.
By crawling the site constantly, he managed to slow down the targeted website. Google uses your website speed when deciding on your rank, so this quickly affected the website. It is possible to prevent people from ‘crawling’ your site like this, but it is a tricky process to block them without blocking entire search engines. - Getting rid of your good backlinks. It can take a long time to build up good backlinks to your website. You may formally request other websites to link to yours in return for a link to their website, but everyone treads cautiously because you don’t want a backlink from a bad website. The negative SEO company managed to get rid of the good backlinks the targeted website had by emailing the other websites to say there was a copyright infringement, so the link needed to be removed immediately. This made the websites panic and immediately remove the link.
These are just a few negative SEO practices, but there are
many more.
If you’re concerned that you may have been a victim of negative SEO,
please get in touch and we can investigate this for you.
We have seen it happen before and there will always be
chancers willing to try it again.
If you already have a web company, they’re likely monitoring
a number of things to ensure your website is staying safe. We’ll talk about the
warning signs that your website has been attacked in a later blog, but leave a
comment below if you have any queries!
Check out this MOZ blog article tracking down some culprits
of negative SEO for a little bit of an insight into how it all happens... To Catch a Spammer: Uncovering Negative SEO
Heroes of White Hat SEO,
And modest too!
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