Negative SEO
The term “negative SEO” refers to various measures that aim to deliberately damage third-party websites. One example of this is the placement of low-quality backlinks, which causes the ranking of well-known search engines to fall. Negative SEO violates all the guidelines of well-known search engines.
Types of Negative SEO
- Duplicate content
Duplicate content is when the content of a website is copied and scattered around the web.
A bad neighborhood refers to links that link exclusively to spam websites.
Hacking involves hacking your own website in order to insert nofollow and noindex into the meta information. However, damage can also be caused by hacking the robots.txt file. This prevents the crawler from visiting the page content.
What helps against negative SEO?
There are many different options for negative SEO, which do not just allow for one promising solution. However, there are only a few measures that can be followed to avoid a negative SEO attack. Such an attack cannot be prevented directly, but the probability of an attack is reduced. The most helpful tool is probably high-quality and unique content. A domain that offers quality content at regular intervals gives potential attacks no chance at all. As soon as the site operator defines a natural link profile, a sharp increase in spam links can be quickly recognized and thus an attack can be prevented in the next step. The risk of an attack can be reduced in the long term by having a clean domain in the on- and off-page area.
As soon as a case of a negative SEO attack has occurred in which harmful backlinks have been identified, the site operator should first contact the sites concerned and ask the operator to remove the links in question. This contact should be kept as evidence in case Google actually takes manual measures and creates a so-called reconsideration request.
With the help of the Disavow Link Tool, unwanted links that have not been removed after contacting Google can be removed. As a further measure, the operators of websites with recurring unwanted backlinks can be reported to the search engine. The contact forms provided for this purpose can be found on the pages of the respective search engine. The websites in question should ultimately be reported, as there is no direct way for Negative SEO to display them. This is because it is webspam.
Early detection is particularly important for negative SEO. The important KPIs of visibility, link profile and domain popularity should be checked through regular reporting. Irregularities can be quickly detected under these key figures, which must be removed immediately by a countermeasure.
Negative SEO attacks
Little money needs to be invested in order to use a successful negative SEO attack. It is also not necessary to have your own link farm. This strategy can therefore be used by any website operator who has a technical understanding of the measures.
Negative SEO and search engine optimization
Not only the victims of negative SEO attacks are harmed by examples that have become public, but also the field of search engine optimization, which suffers from a negative image. Vulnerabilities of search engine providers are publicized through negative measures. Large search engines, such as Google, react against the operators of spam with regular updates. Search engines also offer specially programmed tools. However, the effect of invalidated links only weakens after weeks. This is particularly serious for operators of online stores, as only a small amount of revenue can be generated. This clearly shows how dependent websites are on Google. With a positive SEO strategy, the probability of a negative SEO attack is at least lower.
