What is Negative SEO, And How Do I Protect My Site Against It?

SEO or 'search engine optimisation' is what every marketer must master in order to perform well in Google's rankings, maintain a high domain authority (DA), and ensure that your company gets found online amidst all of your competitors. But, there is a little nefarious term that anyone who is in anyway involved in online marketing and SEO will no doubt have come across at some point or other over the past few years – negative SEO.

Take a look at this message sent out by Google back in 2012 within Google Webmaster Tools:

What Is Negative SEO?

Now, we all know about black hat techniques that companies sometimes use in order to cheat their own website higher up SERPs (search engine results pages). But negative SEO, as is outlined in the letter above, is about using similarly illicit and underhanded techniques to attack and damage a rival website's ranking, and send it plummeting down SERPs.

As you can see from the message that Google sent out, if your website comes under a negative SEO attack, it is unfortunately your responsibility, and your ranking that will get damaged.

This is quite a predicament to find yourself in. Let's now take a look at some of the ways in which a negative SEO attack may be carried out.

Types Of Negative SEO Attack:

A rival may point hundreds of low-quality and spam-heavy links to your website. The most negatively effective ones will use unsavoury keywords (things like 'Viagra' and 'Poker') and typically have absolutely nothing to do with your content.

They may also try and drastically impinge your server speed by sending thousands of requests every second to your server.

A rival may copy your website's content and distribute it hundreds of times around the internet, which puts you at high risk of transgressing Google's duplicate content policy.

There is a possibility that someone could get in contact with the legitimate authority sites on which you have managed to attain a quality backlink, and, pretending to be you, ask to have them removed.

Fake social media profiles can be set up to deliberately slate your company, thusly ruining your online reputation.

Is Negative SEO A Real Concern?

Yes. Absolutely. Without a shadow of a doubt. According to KISSmetrics, numerous websites have had to deal with a negative SEO attack.

However, Google's Matt Cutts made a statement in a video response to negative SEO that outlines the following:

"If you're just a regular small business you are not likely to run up against this. There are a lot of people who talk about negative SEO, but very few people who try it and fewer who still actually succeed."

This video was published back in 2012, the same year that Google released the first version of its Penguin algorithm, which was created to penalise the use of unnatural and spammy links.

Since then there has been a number of updates to the Penguin algorithm, and, put simply, Google does indeed work hard to try and ensure that a competitor cannot hurt your site's ranking by pointing bad links in your direction. However, as Google freely admits, it cannot guarantee that it gets everything right all of the time.

How To Protect Yourself Against Negative SEO

There are, unfortunately, no hard and fast rules that can be applied every time to absolutely protect yourself against negative SEO attacks. The fact of the matter is that there just isn't a set list of negative SEO tactics that an attacker will use every time. If somebody is determined to attack your site, then they will first identify its weaknesses and proceed to exploit them from there.

However, there are some best practices that you can follow to try and reduce the risk of your site being attacked with negative SEO.

So, make sure that you are doing the following:

Building a strong DA and ensuring that your website is popular online for all the right reasons. A site with an already strong DA will less likely be penalised by Google should it suddenly come under an attack of bad links.

Keep a very close track of any unnatural inbound links to your site. You can do this by simply heading over to Google Webmaster Tools and searching for the links to your site. From here you will be able to download a list of the latest links to your site, where you will be able to clearly identify if any unnatural or spammy links are pointing at your site.

Always protect your best backlinks. If an attacker is trying to remove your best backlinks and begins to succeed then your ranking could be in big trouble. You can keep a close eye on all of your back links by using the tool at MonitorBacklinks.com. This way, you will be able to notice very quickly if any of your quality links are tampered with, and, if they are, you should get in contact with the hosting webmaster immediately and find out what's happened.

Routinely check that your content is not being duplicated elsewhere on the web. To do this you can use the free tool provided by copyscape.com and you will quickly discover if your content is being published anywhere else.

As a last resort, use Google's disavowal tool, but only if you are sure that you are in receipt of a lot of poor quality backlinks to your site. This tool tells Google not to take into account any low-quality links when it crawls your site. However, this might mean that some genuine links get discounted too, so it's a last resort technique only.

Follow these procedures if you think you are coming under attack from negative SEO, but, always remember in the first place that creating a great website with great content and attaining a high DA and PageRank is the best line of defence in the first instance. A great site is rewarded with great SEO, and there's not a lot that attackers can do about that. However, whilst you're still in the process of building your online reputation, it's always best to err on the side of caution, so keep a close eye on all those inbound links and always find out exactly where they come from.

Have you ever come under a negative SEO attack? What are your tactics in protecting your site against such things? Let us know below.

The following two tabs change content below. John Waldron is a writer with markITwrite who regularly writes on lifestyle and technology. He is also a fiction writer who has penned a number of short stories, play scripts, and stories for children. He is the author of the foraging blog, First Time Foragers: Recipes and Stories for Beginners. He has a First-Class Honours Degree in English with Creative Writing and an MA in Professional Writing from University College Falmouth, Cornwall. Latest posts by John Waldron (see all)
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