A beginner’s guide to negative SEO

So, what exactly IS negative SEO?

Negative SEO is a campaign conducted against your site by a third party (often a competitor) in order to cost you search engine ranking places. The person conducting negative SEO will deploy a range of underhand tactics against your site in order to give Google, or other search engines, reasons to send you sliding down the ranks. 

The protagonist will do all they can to negatively impact your keyword rankings and remove search visibility, such as copying your content, or fraudulently asking other websites to remove a back link to your site by posing as someone connected to you. They may also create lots of poor quality links back to your site in order to encourage Google to see your domain in a negative light. 

What are the signs of negative SEO? 

• Your website traffic falls and you can’t find any reason for the dip

• You suddenly start to lose search positions despite not changing your own SEO tactics

• Your receive a notification of a penalty or issue from Google, without having done anything against their guidelines yourself

• Your link reports show a sudden number of new links from poor quality sites you don’t recognise

• Your link reports show you’re suddenly losing good links

Steps to take 

Perform a link audit

A lot of negative SEO revolves around sending large quantities of very poor links to a target website. If you regularly monitor your inbound link profile (as you should!) you will notice when a suspicious number of links you haven’t built start to emerge. You can then be proactive about getting those links disassociated – either by contacting the site’s in question and reporting the link be removed or by submitting a link disavow report to Google. 

Monitor for scraped content

Taking your own content and duplicating it around the web can lead your site to see a fall in rankings as Google will only index that content once. That means if another site, using your own content is indexed, your own search rankings can call. You can use tools to automate this process for you – something like Copyscape will crawl the web and report back to you with any duplicate copies of your content. It will show the percentage of content that is replicated and provide the link to that URL. This means you can contact the site and request the content be removed, citing copyright infringement. If that doesn’t work, report the breach to Google using this form. 

Be proactive about review monitoring

Another form of negative content sees one star reviews left for your brand on review sites. If you monitor your online reviews and spot a fake one, report it to the platform concerned and request its removal. 

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