In a broad sense, negative SEO is an action performed on a website to try and decrease its search engine rankings. It usually occurs when a webmaster attempts to “game” a search engine (usually Google) into thinking that a competitors website is lower quality than it actually is. After all, if a webmaster’s site is sitting at number five for a certain keyword, it could potentially be easier to remove the four sites above rather than trying to move up the rankings naturally.
Why has negative SEO suddenly gone “mainstream”?
Negative SEO has always been part of the webmaster vocabulary, but you’ve probably heard a lot more about the subject over the last couple of months. Google’s Penguin update, which targeted websites that were using certain link building practices, appeared to make it much easier to get another site penalised. The theory is that if thousands of websites were penalised for bad linking by the Penguin update, there was nothing stopping a webmaster from using those same links on a competitor’s website to get him or her penalised too.
There are plenty of ways that someone could negatively influence a websites search engine ranking. DDoS attacks are an extreme example, as if your site is down for a long period of time the search engines are likely to consider it unreliable. Spamming thousands of low quality links to make a link profile look artificially bad is just one example of negative SEO, but it’s probably the most common. This is because it’s cheap and easy to perform – tens of thousands of forum profile links can be bought for less than £10 – and is also extremely difficult to prevent or remedy.
It’s important to point out that there’s been little to no official response from Google as to the scale of the problem (no surprise there). Most webmasters agree that negative SEO exists and can potentially be an issue, but how easy it is to get a competitor penalised is still open for debate. Negative SEO has a lot of buzz surrounding it at the moment, so it’s common to see inexperienced webmasters blaming poor rankings on a rogue competitor it without any real proof.
Are you a victim of negative SEO?
So, how can you tell if you’ve been a victim of negative SEO? If you lose rankings then this could be due to any number of reasons, including problems with your own linking profile, a search engine algorithm update or just other competitors becoming stronger. The easiest way to check whether someone is trying to negatively affect your rankings is to analyse your backlink profile. There are a number of tools available for this (Ahrefs and Majestic SEO are two of the most popular). If you see a large number of low quality links, often numbering in the thousands, that you didn’t create yourself then you could have a problem.
Another sign of negative SEO is if you see a huge spike in the number of low quality links coming to your site. Someone who knows what they’re doing typically won’t try to cause a drop in rankings with a few links – they’ll create thousands of them in a short period of time to have the biggest impact possible.
The good news is that it’s more likely for these low quality links to be discounted by the search engines rather than cause a domain-wide penalty. Negative SEO is also far less common than many SEO blogs and news sites would have you believe. The bad news is that if someone wants to hurt your rankings there’s not a lot you can do about it, other than keep building high quality, natural links and avoiding bad link neighbourhoods. If you have a strong link profile to begin with then the time, money and effort required for someone to have a negative impact is far greater.
http://genuineseo.net/
Why has negative SEO suddenly gone “mainstream”?
Negative SEO has always been part of the webmaster vocabulary, but you’ve probably heard a lot more about the subject over the last couple of months. Google’s Penguin update, which targeted websites that were using certain link building practices, appeared to make it much easier to get another site penalised. The theory is that if thousands of websites were penalised for bad linking by the Penguin update, there was nothing stopping a webmaster from using those same links on a competitor’s website to get him or her penalised too.
There are plenty of ways that someone could negatively influence a websites search engine ranking. DDoS attacks are an extreme example, as if your site is down for a long period of time the search engines are likely to consider it unreliable. Spamming thousands of low quality links to make a link profile look artificially bad is just one example of negative SEO, but it’s probably the most common. This is because it’s cheap and easy to perform – tens of thousands of forum profile links can be bought for less than £10 – and is also extremely difficult to prevent or remedy.
It’s important to point out that there’s been little to no official response from Google as to the scale of the problem (no surprise there). Most webmasters agree that negative SEO exists and can potentially be an issue, but how easy it is to get a competitor penalised is still open for debate. Negative SEO has a lot of buzz surrounding it at the moment, so it’s common to see inexperienced webmasters blaming poor rankings on a rogue competitor it without any real proof.
Are you a victim of negative SEO?
So, how can you tell if you’ve been a victim of negative SEO? If you lose rankings then this could be due to any number of reasons, including problems with your own linking profile, a search engine algorithm update or just other competitors becoming stronger. The easiest way to check whether someone is trying to negatively affect your rankings is to analyse your backlink profile. There are a number of tools available for this (Ahrefs and Majestic SEO are two of the most popular). If you see a large number of low quality links, often numbering in the thousands, that you didn’t create yourself then you could have a problem.
Another sign of negative SEO is if you see a huge spike in the number of low quality links coming to your site. Someone who knows what they’re doing typically won’t try to cause a drop in rankings with a few links – they’ll create thousands of them in a short period of time to have the biggest impact possible.
The good news is that it’s more likely for these low quality links to be discounted by the search engines rather than cause a domain-wide penalty. Negative SEO is also far less common than many SEO blogs and news sites would have you believe. The bad news is that if someone wants to hurt your rankings there’s not a lot you can do about it, other than keep building high quality, natural links and avoiding bad link neighbourhoods. If you have a strong link profile to begin with then the time, money and effort required for someone to have a negative impact is far greater.
http://genuineseo.net/
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