What is negative SEO and how to prevent it from damaging the traffic of your pages

In the 90s when SEO just appeared on the scene, there were no well-established rules of the game to improve the positioning of a site, so both good and bad practices developed in the industry. 

Just as good practices are an ethical way to improve organic traffic and the position of a page in search engines, bad practices go against the guidelines of companies like Google, for taking unethical actions. 

Bad SEO techniques or practices, also called Black Hat SEO, try to take advantage of search engine ranking factors to improve the exposure of a given website without taking into account the user experience or the real value of the content that is positioned. 

As Google's algorithm has become more sophisticated and bad practices lose more and more relevance, some advertisers have migrated to a much more aggressive tactic: negative SEO. 

What is Negative SEO?

First of all, the term negative SEO is not entirely correct since in this case no optimization is carried out. However, this practice is called that, when a competitor uses unethical methods to decrease the performance of another site in search engines. 

This means that a malicious user can use techniques to attack the traffic of another site, hoping to improve the performance of its pages. This type of attack is mainly detected when the position of a website in a search engine drops suddenly. 

What is a Negative SEO attack?

Outside of your website 

It's when a competitor uses tactics like building a fake backlink network or duplicating your site's content to negatively impact your search engine ranking. 

Inside your website

A Negative SEO attack can include hacking your site to modify its content, in a way that the attacker considers will cause damage to your positioning. You can also add links from the attacked site to your own domain to improve your rankings. 

Below I will show you in detail some of these negative tactics and how to avoid them: 

Create a fake link network

One of the ways a competitor can use negative SEO to attack your site is to build a network of false links or backlinks, also called "spam" backlinks.

Links "spam" or "bad links" are links from websites reported as untrustworthy. Sometimes they are not owned by a human being (or at least not one with good intentions) or they are simply links from a site that does not serve a clear purpose to the online audience. 

Basically the attack consists of sending thousands of spam links to your site with low quality pages that only interconnect with each other. In this way the attacker gets your site to be penalized by Google for having spam links. 

The second method that a competitor can use Negative SEO to impact your backlinks is to remove your best links to other sites. This means that the attacker communicates with the administrator of a site with which you are intentionally linked, impersonates you and requests to remove the backlink.

What to do about it?

To avoid this attack it is important to keep track of your backlinks. To check which sites your page is linked to, you can use Ahrefs, Monitor Backlinks or any other of your choice. 

With these tools you can monitor when your site gains or loses backlinks. If you suspect that a "bad link" has been added you can remove it by contacting your webmaster.

To remove several bad links at once, you can use Google's link disavower. When you submit the links to the Google Tools Webmaster through a reject file, you are informing the search engine not to count the links in the listing when ranking your website. 

Another method you can use to detect fake links is to check the speed of your website. If from one moment to another your pages take too long to load, I recommend that you check that it is not because thousands of requests are being sent to your server, due to the load of these false links. 

Duplicate content

When there is duplicate content on the web, Google filters these pages so that the result is a drop in the ranking of your pages. This is due to the fact that the search engine is forced to choose which page of the duplicates to show, so it may not choose the original. 

While it is true that it is inevitable that there is similar content on the web, the fact that there are several identical pages will negatively impact the positioning of your site. 

If someone wants to attack your site, the only thing they should do is replicate the content of your website on several pages.

What to do about it?

There are several ways to avoid this situation. 

• You can use tools to monitor if your content has been duplicated. Sites like copyscape.com or another similar, can detect if the content of your pages has been used anywhere on the web. 
• Contact the site owner and copy a legal advisor. If you run a business website, copy the legal department of that company so that the recipient sees the seriousness of your message. 
• Update your site's terms of service to state that duplicating content that originated from your domain is prohibited. This won't stop anyone, but it will give you the ownership you need against any attacker on your site. 
• Add canonical tags to your highest performing content. These labels are usually denoted as and allow Google to determine that this is the original URL. By adding this tag to your own content you are giving your pages a canonical self-reference, so any other duplicate content will be less likely to rank in search engines for the same keywords. 

Hack your website

While many of these Negative SEO tactics take place outside of your website, there is the possibility that a competitor will hack into your site and perform maneuvers such as altering its internal code, to affect your ranking. This can happen without your knowing it, unless you go to the back end of all your pages and do a manual review.

Another way they can attack your site is by editing your robot.txt file. This file tells the search engine how to interact with your pages. If a hacker manages to get in there, they can use your robot.txt file to tell Google to ignore your most popular pages or your entire site. 

What to do about it?

One way to avoid this is to use the Google Webmaster email alert tool. These alerts will notify you if your site is being attacked by malware, if your pages are not being indexed or if you suffer a manual penalty from Google. 

Additionally, you can protect yourself from hackers by setting up a two-step identification process, setting a strong password, creating backup files, and activating an antivirus. 

Generate negative reviews

Just as having a large number of reviews can help improve SEO on your pages, the existence of a large number of negative comments can impact the reputation of your business. 

One Negative SEO tactic a competitor can use is to fill your site with bad reviews, as these are easy to create. 

What to do about it?

To avoid this you should monitor your reviews and make sure to use them as an opportunity to respond and interact with your audience. 

If you come across fake reviews of someone who is faking their identity or connection to your business, you can report it directly to Google. 

Create fake profiles on social networks

Another tactic a competitor can use to impact your ranking is to create fake profiles with your company name. This is used to ruin your reputation and distribute false information. 

What to do about it?

To avoid this situation, you can report these fake profiles as spam before they start to have followers. 

To contain this situation you can use mentions monitoring tools in social networks, so that you are informed when someone mentions the name of your company or website. Most automation tools have this option so that you are informed when fake profiles are created. 

Although Negative SEO can be very annoying, search engines are increasingly monitoring these types of practices so they are increasingly easier to control. The important thing is that you monitor the health of your SEO regularly to make sure you anticipate an attack before it hits your site.