Types of Negative SEO and Different Ways to Tackle it

It’s quite a task to gain traffic and rankings for your website. But what if your nearest rivals make nefarious attempts to tank down rankings by using several notorious negative SEO tricks? Negative SEO isn’t a newly coined term. It’s been haunting marketers since the very inception of search engines. The article explains 11 types of negative SEO activities that are used to hurt competitors' ranking. Read on these SEO types to stay safe.

If you’re in the SEO space, negative SEO is a topic that you should be aware of. This article is a quick walkthrough to let you know how Negative SEO attacks your website and how to stay safe against any such attempt. There are numerous ways in which hackers and black hat professionals attack websites.

The sole motive behind any such negative SEO attack is to hurt your website ranking, affect your traffic and dent your online reputation. Fortunately, you can reduce the damage if you are prepared and alert against such attacks.

What is Negative SEO?

Negative SEO comprises a set of black hat SEO activities that your competitors launch against you to tarnish your online reputation and bring down your search rankings. These black hat activities may include creating tons of unnatural/spammy links indicating to your site, content scraping, and hacking the site. Following is the list of Negative SEO activities you should take note of.

Types of Negative SEO?

1. Link Farms

Technically, in link farms, websites are interconnected and linked with each other to increase the link popularity pages of each site. PBNs or Private Blog Networks are an example of link farms. They are a network of sites created solely for creating tons of spammy links and are typically owned by one individual or a team.

Most of the domains in the blog network are expired. This means by the time they are included in a PBN they have accumulated some backlinks and authority.

To recall, Google’s Penguin update in 2012 was aimed at destroying PBNs. If Google finds backlinks coming from a link farm, it justly concludes that the website is involved in a link scheme. It eventually compels Google to impose a Google penalty against the website. That’s how the competitors use link farms to destroy your website’s credibility.

To recall, Google’s Penguin update in 2012 was aimed at destroying PBNs. If Google finds the backlinks coming from a link farm, it justly concludes that the website is involved in a link scheme. It eventually compels Google to impose a Google penalty against the website. That’s how the competitors use link farms to destroy your website’s credibility.

So, compare your existing links with the links that appear to be coming from a possible attack. Once the analysis is done, you will get the list of the links that are probably part of an attack. If you notice a massive influx of backlinks that are beyond the natural link flow your website received in the past, get a fact check.

Your competitors use spam software to create high number of links using the same anchors or pile up links from a single specific footprint. It’s not easy to spot unusual backlink patterns. Try to find out if link influx is coming from adult and pharma anchor text phrases or unknown sources. These links may be the result of a negative SEO attack implemented by hackers or black hat SEOs using a spam tool, or possibly someone using a network of sites.

2. Content Scraping

Content scraping is another devastating negative SEO technique where attackers scrap your site's content and copy it to other websites' multiple sites. The act eventually violates Google’s Panda guidelines. If Google spots the stolen version of the content it may de-rank your site.

When Google finds instances of duplicated content across multiple websites, Google picks only the original version of the content to rank. To dodge Google, scrapers often automatically copy new content and report it right away. This is to ensure that scrapped content is getting indexed and ranked before the original.

Sometimes, attackers manage to inject content and link to attack your website. This is another kind of fatal negative SEO attack. If you notice changes in your existing site, access your server logs to determine which internet protocols (IPs) were used for the content or link injection. You should also capture IP information on the new URLs to find the attackers.

3. Fake Reviews

For local businesses where reviews matter a lot, competitors manage to bring fake and negative reviews for your local business. It’s equally disastrous for both your rankings and business.

4. Increased Crawling

Your competitors may stoop even lower to drag you down. They may forcefully crawl your website to surge the server load abruptly. This may cause a website to slow down or in the worst case, may crash it altogether. If the situation continues and your site is down, search engines won’t be able to access your site. This could result in site de-indexing and eventually, a ranking drop.

5. Click Fraud

It’s yet to be established that clicks are directly related to search ranking, though, there have been multiple signals indicating high click rate on a certain search result can boost its rankings; while a low CTR will get a site de-ranked. It’s simple. Attackers design a CTR bot to search for their main keywords and branded terms. The bots automatically click on the client's listing and quickly bounce back to the SERP. An excessive bounce rate leads to a ranking drop in the SERP.

This is another negative SEO tactic to kill a website's ranking. If your very next competitor has Adwords running for the site, you can abruptly click on their adverts to consume their budget and drastically impact their number of genuine visitors. There are already established instances in it affects the search rankings on a serious note.

6. Comment Spam

Comment spam links are the most common negative SEO attack by spammers. It could be done both ways, either manually or by using spamming software. You may have noticed an unusual influx of strange, irrelevant comments with anchor text on posts or pages. These comments are scheduled and triggered by automated software. To prevent comment spam, access server logs and isolate which IPs were used in the posting attempts. To stop these spam comment links from bothering you, you can turn off comments or add stronger CAPTCHAs and spam traps like Akismet.com.

7. Hotlinking

The problem with Hotlinking is that it’s hard to notice until the maximum destruction has been done. This negative SEO trick directly impacts a website’s performance affect your site’s performance. In Hotlinking, attackers embed your images on their website by linking directly to them. Since it consumes your bandwidth, offenders easily discover your website traffic coming in via your analytics and data usage in your raw logs. The attackers then export the list of domains hosting your images.

8. Manipulated User Signals

It’s ideally a hard nut to crack. You can’t easily distinguish between normal and manipulated user signals. Use your intellect to what’s purposely being done and what’s manipulated. Manipulated user signals can be seen in the form of unrealistic spikes of spammy traffic on specific pages. If you find any such occurrence of such traffic, isolate, block, and remove the IPs the traffic is coming from.

9. Google Bowling

This is quite an effective process where you force Google to believe that your nearest competitor is playing spammy tactics to achieve search positions. You have two ways to do this. The first method is to add bad links to the site that are secured from bad neighborhoods, link farms and automatically generated spammy pages.

This leads to triggering a spam alert and serious impact on the website ranking. Another way to perform Google bowling is to create hundreds of links with different competitor site URLs but using the same content. Now post these links across various platforms and request Google to take notice of the same.

10. Tattling

Tattling is an innovative negative SEO trick where webmasters notify Google that a particular website defies the established Google guidelines. It may also be done by placing a complaint to Google against any sort of copyright infringement on a particular website.

11. False Content

This can be done by creating a website and placing the same content that your competitor's site has. But make sure that the new content to the site is indexed by the search engine before your competitor. For instance, if your nearest competitor changes their service page, you change your service page with the same content and meta tag and submit the sitemap before his submission. The magic starts here. When the crawler comes to the index, it finds your page first in the race and the other page is a sheer duplicate. This will be quite difficult for your competitor to face.

How to Prevent Negative SEO Attacks?

The article illustrates below effective steps to fix negative SEO attacks and bring back brand reputation. Can you afford to see your website lose rankings just because a bunch of black hat people performed negative SEO on it? You'll answer in negative. It does hurt even if your website gets penalized for a week or a month. Dipping rankings mean declining visitor influx and dwindling revenue forecast. Fortunately, there are ways to tackle this menace and keep your business safe. Here we go :

1: Set up Google Alerts

Google alerts are quite effective in tracking event occurrences related to your website. If you haven't yet set up email alerts in Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmasters Tools, do it now. Once Google Alerts are set, you will get an instant notification:

• if your website meets a malware attack
• If website pages are not indexed
• If a website gets a Google penalty

If you haven’t yet activated Google alerts, visit your Google Search Console account to do it right now.

2: Monitor Your Backlink Profile

Scammers attack your online business by building low-quality links or redirects. This is therefore important to know when bad links or redirects are made to your website. You can leverage tools like Ahrefs or Open Site Explorer to manually check if someone is building spammy links to your website. Most of the negative SEO attacks that happen on a website come in the form of backlinks.

Therefore, watching your backlink profile closely may help you escape the threat at a larger extent. People performing negative SEO usually create hundreds and thousands of poisonous low-quality backlinks pointing to your site.

So, you must be vigilant about those backlinks as soon they are built. You may use various link monitoring tools to track if someone is creating redirects or links to your website. These tools alert you when your website gets new backlinks or loses a few.

3: Keep Your Website Safe from Hacking

Sometimes attackers hack websites and make changes to the important codes. They even inject malicious codes to force websites to function ambiguously. Such attempts are dreaded and have a direct impact on ranking and traffic. To escape such attacks, it’s important to have your site protected with SSL and antivirus.

In addition, you can also do multiple things to secure your website. We recommend you to install an authenticator plugin on your WordPress website. As soon as you log in to your WP website, you will be asked to input a code generated by Google. Furthermore, create strong passwords and take regular backups of your website.

Sometimes attackers hack websites and make changes to the important codes. They even inject malicious codes to force websites to function ambiguously. Such attempts are dreaded and have a direct impact on ranking and traffic. To escape such attacks, it’s important to have your site protected with SSL and antivirus.

In addition, you can also do multiple things to secure your website. We recommend you install an authenticator plugin on your WordPress website. As soon as you log in to your WP website, you will be asked to input a code generated by Google. Furthermore, create strong passwords and take regular backups of your website

4: Go Through Duplicate Content

Content plagiarism is another negative SEO method that spammers use to hurt your reputation. This is another most common negative SEO technique where spammers copy your entire website content and publish it randomly in multiple places. Such occurrences of duplicate content will invite the threat of Google Panda penalty.

If your website comes under penalty, you may lose rankings. To check if your website has duplicate, thin or spam content, you can use tools like Copyscape. When checked, the tool shows off if the whole content or its portion is already published somewhere else.

Spammers copy your content and publish it across the internet. This mass duplicity hurts website ranking and visibility. If it happens, there would be fair chances Google will penalize your website. Use some free or paid software to check plagiarism on your website.

5: Keep Watching Your Social Media Mentions

To abuse and manipulate your social media presence, spammers use to create fake accounts in your brand name on social media channels. Once created, they use these impersonating accounts to spread misleading messages to malign your brand image. If you manage to spot any such attempt, report them immediately to authorities and request them to remove the profile. You may use tools like ‘Mention’ to find if someone is using your brand name.

As soon as the tool detects that someone is impersonating you brand name to create fake profiles, it will send an alert notification so that you can decide the next course of action.

6: Monitor Your Website Speed

Amused by how website speed could be a signal to a negative SEO attempt? Here is how. Spammers use bots to send hundreds and thousands of server requests per second. These frequent requests put high loads on the server; if they goes untamed, it may crash your server. If your hosting server is getting an unusual number of requests, check if it’s normal or due to both attacks.

Use tools like ‘Wordfence’ to protect the website from the automated traffic request. The tool blocks any such traffic if the request exceeds a given limit, say 300 requests per minute.

Due to the rampant increase in competition in the online world, the rate of negative SEO attacks is also growing at an alarming rate. Brands need to be more careful and active to track any such attack. Your Site's speed is an important metric and a crucial ranking factor too.

If you suddenly notice that your website is taking more than expected time to load, you might be the victim of forceful crawling. People behind negative SEO manipulate existing crawling with forceful crawling. It causes massive server load and interruption that eventually leads to a drop in website speed and sometimes even results in a site crash.

Tarun Gupta

Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.