Negative SEO is the act of using Black Hat SEO on other websites in order to get them penalized by Google. Negative SEO can also include reducing the effectiveness of a website’s SEO properties by disabling or altering them.
Types Of Negative SEO
Negative Off-Page SEO
As the name implies, Negative Off-Page SEO attacks without internally changing your website. Mostly it revolves around using Black Hat or negative SEO link building practices and point them to the target website:
- Obvious link farms – guaranteed blacklisted link farms
- Scrapers
- Fake reviews
- Heavy crawling – it may make your website speed very slow or even down.
- Copyright complaints – someone claiming that you’ve posted material that belongs to them
- Falsify duplicate content – – basically just copying and pasting your web pages over and over
there are many different ways for negative SEO techniques to be done to your website… but no matter how tempting they might be, you should never even consider doing any of these yourself.
Negative On-Page SEO ( hacking into your site and changing things around )
- Negatively altering your SEO properties
- Changing the Robots.txt
- Modifying Redirects
- Links to illegal websites from your website
- Make your Site de-indexed
Google is quite good at detecting when negative SEO is occurring. For example, if someone’s trying to do some Google Bowling and smash you over with site-wide links, there’s a good chance that the link from that site will only be counted as one vote from them – unlikely to do you any real harm.
The most likely websites to be targeted for SEO are those in highly-competitive, high-money fields – gambling sites are a common example of this. Sites that are in calmer niches are far less likely to be hit by negative SEO – indeed, anything that happens is more likely to be an accident or a remnant of an old advertising strategy instead of a deliberate attack on you.
how to protect your website from negative SEO ?
- Set up Google Webmaster Tools Email Alerts. Google can send you email alerts when: …
- Keep Track of Your Backlinks Profile. …
- Protect Your Best Backlinks. …
- Secure Your Website from Malware and Hackers. …
- Check for Duplicate Content. …
- Monitor Your Social Media Mentions. …
- Watch Your Website Speed.