Negative SEO - and how to protect yourself

We all know that since the release of the Penguin algorithm update, Google has been targeting websites that are Black Hat SEO-techniques are severely punished:

What if someone evil (e.g. your next competitor) starts using these techniques on your website just to punish you?

This, ladies and gentlemen, is called Negative SEO.

What is Negative SEO?

Negative SEO is the application of Black Hat SEO to other websites in order to have them penalized by Google. Negative SEO can also mean reducing the effectiveness of a website's SEO features by disabling or changing them.

Dealing with negative SEO techniques can be quite difficult as some of these techniques are out of your control, such as placing bad links (also known as link bombs) on your website. They are also difficult to recognize.

Unlike some hacking practices that aim to deface or simply destroy a website, a negative SEO attack does not affect the appearance of a website.

Instead, the effects only become visible when the website suffers a drop in search rankings and inbound Traffic suffers.

But why would someone commit a negative SEO attack?

Similar to hackers, the reasons for negative SEO attacks can be very different. They may be deliberately sabotaging a competitor's website, blackmailing them or just "having fun" with it. Don't be surprised if you find a lot of these negative SEO services on the internet.

And believe it or not, there are also unintentional negative SEO attacks. There are cases where family members, employees or even hired SEO Agencyintentionally use outdated black hat practices on behalf of the owner because they believe that doing so will benefit the owner. Ranking their website helps.

Types of negative SEO attacks

Like normal SEO, negative SEO has both an on-page and off-page aspect:

Negative Offpage SEO

As the name suggests, Negative Offpage SEO attacks without changing the website internally. Most of the time, it is about preventing black hat or negative SEO.Linkbuilding-practices and direct them to the target website:

Link farms

Linkfarmen are a set of websites that are created for the sole purpose of linking to another website.

Normally, inbound links are a good thing, as they increase the Ranking of your website. However, if you get a lot of links from the same unrelated, spammy websites, this shows Google that you are trying to artificially increase the number of links pointing to your site.

In a negative SEO attack, malicious parties create obvious link farms and link massively to the target website.

Sometimes they also buy link farm services to achieve the same effect. Since it is difficult for Google to find out who is responsible for the links, this can lead to Google penalizing the target page if it is discovered.

Copyright complaints

These are a little more complex, but essentially involve someone claiming that you have published material that belongs to them.

In many cases, this can result in the page being automatically removed for up to 10 days - and wouldn't it be terrible if your landing pages disappeared in the middle of your biggest campaign?

After all, competitors can Duplicate Content fake - basically just copy and paste your websites over and over again, maybe even as part of the link farms mentioned above.

A wave of Duplicate Content on different domains may indicate a manipulation attempt aimed at creating several different websites with the same Content to rank. This used to be a popular SEO technique before Google started cracking down on it.

As you can see, there are many different ways to apply negative SEO techniques to your website. But as tempting as they may be, you should never consider using any of these techniques yourself.

Even if it works in the short term, it won't work forever. Plus, it could get you into serious legal trouble if someone can prove you're behind it.

Negative onpage SEO

This type of attack is slightly different and usually focuses on getting into your website and changing things. In just a few minutes, a hacker can disrupt the programming of your website, introduce viruses and generally destroy everything you've built.

However, the real threats are difficult to identify:

Change the Robots.txt:

Robots.txt is one of the most important files on your website when it comes to SEO, as it tells the crawlers how to interact with your website. It is usually used to tell Google which parts of the website should not be crawled and indexed, such as an active but unfinished page. An attacker who has access to your website can easily modify the robots.txt file to tell Google to ignore important pages or even the entire website.

Negative change to your SEO settings:

Hand on heart - do you really notice when someone uses the Alt text of your images so that it is less effective? Many basic SEO techniques are designed to be set and forget - but that's exactly what makes you vulnerable to these attacks.

Even a small change can lead to Google completely ignoring a website.

Change redirects:

Search engines have an opinion about certain error pages - namely that they are bad. Sites that automatically redirect from bad pages aren't usually penalized too much, but if you change, disable or encrypt your redirects, you may find yourself in the Ranking slipping.

The good news is that negative SEO attacks, as we'll see later, are much harder to carry out and much easier for a competent programming team to fix.

The probability of negative SEO attacks

Negative SEO services aren't hard to find, but are they really worth it? With all the things we've discussed here, you might be worried that Negative SEO is rampant and you're just out of the loop. Google is pretty good at detecting negative SEO. For example, if someone is trying to outrank you with cross-site links, it's very likely that the link from that page will only be counted as one vote from them.

It's unlikely to do you any real harm. Also, keep in mind that even though Google is actively working against Black Hat SEO-practices, some of them may go through for a while. This means that negative SEO attempts are no guarantee that the victim will be penalized by Google. They can even have the opposite effect and help the target rank better. Ranking help!

Hacking attempts aren't that hard to avoid either, as long as you use a robust system to protect your website (make sure it's up to date). Also, avoid using simple admin passwords just because you think no one is interested in destroying your humble website. As they say, better safe than sorry. In general, Negative SEO can be costly, labor-intensive and risky. On the other hand, success is not guaranteed because even if it works, it can easily be reversed once the target realizes what's happening.

In short:

Negative SEO is a high risk, low reward activity. Unless there's a compelling reason (revenge perhaps?), it's pretty unlikely that anyone will try it. Websites in highly competitive, high-revenue areas are most likely to be affected by Black Hat SEO gambling sites are a common example. Sites in quieter niches are much less likely to be affected by Negative SEO - this is more likely to be an accident or a remnant of an old advertising strategy than a deliberate attack on you.

How to protect your website from negative SEO

Recognition

The first step to protecting your website is to recognize the signs of an attack, such as a sudden drop in organic traffic. This can be easily spotted by checking your Traffic continuously with Google Analytics monitored. A sharp drop in organic traffic sometimes indicates a Google penalty. You can also set up an email notification service. This allows you to be notified by Google via email if your website is not indexed or has received a manual penalty.

If you haven't done anything wrong, this could mean that your website is under attack. The sooner you find out, the faster you can react and minimize the damage.

Google Disavow

Google's answer to Negative SEO is the Disavow tool.

Essentially, it's about saying, "I don't like this link and I don't trust it, please don't include it in my Ranking. By rejecting low-quality links, you prevent your website from being associated with them and thus protect your Ranking and your reputation.

The use of the Disavow-tools also shows Google that you care about the quality of the links pointing to your website. This will be taken into account when Google's webspam team considers penalizing your site if it detects a flood of low-quality links pointing to you. To check for these bad links, you can Ahrefs or SEMrush use. With these tools, you can examine your links more closely and directly create a disavow file to invalidate the links.

Check your SEO settings

This is not tied to a specific problem, but you should check your SEO settings regularly. This includes checking your robot.txt from time to time or randomly checking the internal coding of your content (headings, image alt tag, etc.).

An SEO tool with regular crawls can help you notice certain anomalies more quickly.

Detect scraped content and duplicates

Identical content not only leads to cannibalization problems, but can also cause websites or specific pages to be completely filtered out of search results. Attackers can duplicate the entire website or parts of it to sabotage search performance.

To detect malicious behavior related to the copying of your content or your entire website, you should regularly check the web with tools such as Copyscape or Siteliner. If you discover a fraudulent website that is copying your website, you should do the following:

Contact the provider hosting the fake website and explain why it needs to be removed.

• Use this Google form, to report them and demand their removal.

Concluding thoughts

Back on topic: Let's face it, negative SEO attacks are a real threat, not just a theoretical one. Even if you can report links to Google via a disavow file, it can take some time before Google comes to the conclusion that you are innocent and not the one who wanted to place the links.

The internet is probably the biggest shark tank in the world and many fight with unfair methods, be aware of that. When you put a website online, you are responsible for ensuring that nothing bad happens to it. So always keep your eyes open!