Negative SEO – Has your website been hit?

If you are not getting the rankings you think you should have there can be numerous reasons. Normally there are obvious reasons but when you have exhausted these then you may want to look into Negative SEO.

What is Negative SEO?

Negative SEO is the practice of using black hat and other techniques against webmaster guidelines to sabotage a competitor’s rankings in search engines. Negative SEO attacks can take a number of different forms.

Main areas to look out for

Off Page

The first and obvious place to look is the links coming into your website. This is the easiest way for a competitor to attack your SEO. There are numerous ways to do this. It’s performing link activities that we have been telling everyone not to do for years:

Negative SEO Link Examples:

• A large volume of low-quality websites.
• Getting links from bad neighbourhoods.
• Buying poor quality links.
• Using the same anchor text for a large number of links.
• Submitting to general directories…

On Page

This is normally if someone can access your website in some way. Either by hacking your website of by adding information intended for the website users – such as comments, reviews etc.

Here are a couple of methods:

Content spamming: This is everything from keyword stuffing to shifting page content away from its intended goal.

Manipulating indexed URL’s to drive search engines to poor or simply spammy content. This can be down to CMS flaws or simply site hacking.

Our next article will be showing how to spot negative SEO and prevent it from happening in the future.