Negative SEO is a tactic usually employed by website owners that can’t rank on merit alone.
Instead of improving their site, they use negative SEO to shoot down the more deserving competitors that rank above them.
That’s kind of like competing with Usain Bolt in the Olympics and tying his shoelaces together.
Nobody would watch the Olympics if that were allowed. There’s no fun in watching a loser cheat their way to the top. Similarly, nobody would use Google if the top-ranking page was always spam. And if nobody uses Google, the company has no ad revenue. Their business would disintegrate.
That’s why Google introduced Penguin 4.0. It’s why it runs in real-time and aims to devalue link spam rather than demote entire websites. And it’s why Google continues to invest in efforts to thwart negative SEO.
Dividing the workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on their strengths. The improvements are similar on desktop and mobile. Most of the focus in 2021 was on mobile results.
4. Link spam isn’t the only kind of negative SEO
The three points above explain why link-based negative SEO attacks are much less of an issue than they used to be.
But not all negative SEO attacks are link-based.
Someone could hack your website and inject spammy links, post fake negative reviews online, or something much worse.
This is an important point to keep in mind.
Detecting and deflecting negative SEO isn’t about finding and disavowing links from shady websites anymore. Now it’s about keeping an eye on your entire online presence and employing positive security measures to keep the “baddies” at bay.
How to detect, avoid and fix the most common types of negative SEO attacks
Below I’m going to cover how to spot and defend against these seven types of negative SEO attacks:
Spammy link building
Fake link removal request
Content scraping
False URL parameters
Fake reviews
Hacking your site
DDoS attacks
Let’s start with the tactic most commonly associated with negative SEO.
1. Spammy link building
Building tons of low-quality links to a competing site is likely the most prevalent form of negative SEO—and certainly the most unsophisticated.
Whether those spammy links come from cheap Fiverr gigs, Scrapebox comment spam, or a PBN (Private Blog Network), the result is the same: a sudden influx of shady links pointing to your site.