Date First Published: 17th January 2023
Topic: Web Design & Development
Subtopic: SEO
Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions
Difficulty: MediumDifficulty Level: 6/10
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Learn more about what negative SEO is in this article.
Negative SEO involves a range of malicious techniques designed to lower a competitor’s site rankings in the search results. The techniques are often off-page, but they may also involve website attacks.
As of now, most websites are safe from negative SEO techniques. Google has gotten better at detecting and taking action against unnatural and spammy backlinks and these backlinks do not cause a site to get penalised, but the value of them is demoted in Google’s calculations when calculating the ranking of a site. Also, strong passwords are becoming more common, reducing the chances of unauthorised access to the files or contents of a website.
Negative SEO is not used as part of white hat SEO and is widely considered a malicious practice. Fortunately, there are some steps that can be taken to prevent it. Monitoring the backlink profile, website speed, security, reviews, SERP ranking, and searching for scraped/plagiarised content can help ensure that any instances of negative SEO are discovered before they cause real harm to a website.
Examples of negative SEO techniques include:
This is the most harmful negative SEO technique. It involves an attacker finding a way to gain unauthorised access to the files or content of a website without the owner’s permission. This will allow the attacker to do anything that they want to a site. If it leads to penalties by search engines, the website being deindexed, or the search engine ranking being loewered, the negative SEO attack is successful. Google can detect and remove hacked sites from the search results.
Link schemes, automated programs, and private blog networks are often used for creating artificial links to a website. Websites that artificially gain backlinks used to be penalised, but when the fourth version of the Penguin algorithm update was released in 2016, Google no longer penalised artificial links. Instead, Google devalued them, meaning that the links were no longer counted towards a website's ability to rank on Google.
Google created the disavow tool to help website owners deal with artificial and spammy links pointing to their website, but this should only be used when a website receives a manual action and has done as much as it can to remove the spammy links and there are still some links that it cannot take down.
This negative SEO technique can ruin the reputation of a website. Even though reviews are not a direct ranking factor for organic search rankings, they can lead to a drop in traffic. However, Google does use review scores as a factor in local search engine ranking, so fake negative reviews harm local SEO.
Attackers might try to harm the SEO positions of a website by sending fake removal requests to remove backlinks. They might pretend to be an agency and contact the website owners of the other sites to remove the links pointing to other websites in an attempt to lower the ranking of those pages.
This negative SEO technique targets website owners that have a lack of knowledge of scams and fake requests, so this technique will only work if the website owner falls for it. Since website owners often check who is contacting them, this technique is not as common.
This technique involves someone copying content and posting it onto another site. Google doesn’t like it when content is duplicated across multiple sites and will usually pick one version to rank and ignore the others. Most of the time, Google will notice the original source of the content, but not always. Sometimes, if the content is duplicated on a highly authoritative website, Google might think that the content originated from there, which will cause SEO problems. Sometimes, the spam site may duplicate the content fast enough and get it indexed before the original page.
Plagiarism checking tools, copyright removal requests, the correct use of canonical tags, and good internal linking practices can help reduce the risks of this negative SEO technique.
DDoS attacks aim to flood a website with so much traffic that it cannot operate, causing it to become temporarily unavailable. This is a negative SEO technique as it will cause the pages to return a 503 service unavailable error. If this lasts for an extended period of time, it may lead to Google deindexing the site. Google does deindex pages when they have been returning errors for a long time.
Some forms of DDoS attacks are not designed to make a website unable to respond to legitimate requests. Instead, they may slow it down. This will have a negative impact on the ranking of a site in the SERPs as page speed and core web vitals are minor ranking factors.
Search engines often provide tools for users to report webpages using black hat SEO. Making false reports about black hat SEO tactics to a search engine which include blatant lies and intentional false positives is an attempt to harm the SEO position of a website. Although false reports will often be ignored by search engines, there is still a chance that they will succeed. If the reports are not detected as false, then a penalty will be applied to a competitor's website, which will lower their rankings or deindex pages.
Negative SEO is not the same thing as black hat SEO. Black hat SEO refers to a range of unethical techniques used to make a website rank higher in the search results that are against the guidelines of search engines. These techniques are designed to unethically boost the ranking of pages of the owner’s website. Negative SEO is more focused on lowering a competitor’s ranking in the search results using malicious techniques, such as sending fake backlink removal requests, hacking, duplicate content, DDoS attacks, sending false reports, etc.
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