Negative SEO is a shady practice targeted at competitor sites to hurt their traffic, ranking, and web performance. It involves techniques to manipulate search engines into thinking that a competitor is an untrustworthy player. It is also called Black Hat SEO.
Unethical optimizers use this practice to steal the search engine rankings of their competitors. The techniques involve creating fake social profiles and generating tens of thousands of spammy links to your site to tarnish your online image.
Advanced black-hat search engine optimizers involve in hacking websites. The good news is that no matter how bad the attack is, there are ways to overcome it.
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Different Types of Negative SEO
1) Link Farming
It is SEO 101 that Google values your site if it has good links pointing to it. The more good links from authoritative sites, the higher the chances for your site to rank high.
But what will happen if you acquire links from sites that have spammy content or those that host the 3Ps, aka, Pills, porn, and poker? Google will devalue your site or may altogether drop your site from the index.
Attackers know this very well. Hence, they use automated software and Public Blog Networks (PBNs) to make your site an objectionable one in the eyes of search engines.
Solution: If your site experiences a sharp drop in traffic, wake up. Audit the links using a tool like Ahrefs to identify the ones from spammy sites. Once identified, submit to Google a ‘disavow’ file containing all links that attack your site with spammy links.
2) Fake Social Media Profiles
Some create fake social media profiles using your logo and name to get some online mileage out of your brand value. This is a common issue renowned brands face. There is a thriving underground industry involved in identity theft.
Attackers and bots use profile photos and details of a brand or a person to impersonate them. For an untrained eye, it is really tough to differentiate between a fake profile and a real one.
Scammers are so clever that they can recreate an entity’s logo, font, and color scheme with an uncanny resemblance to siphon off their value.
Take a look at this fake Twitter profile of Donald J Trump.
Solution: Ask your followers to report fake profiles. This is the best method to achieve quick results. Using a social media monitoring tool is an effective way to identify fake profiles at the beginning stage.
Tools like Intsights can help you identify fake profiles. These tools monitor social mentions and alert you in time if something is fishy.
3) Duplicating Your Content
Attackers use this tactic to make search algorithms punish you. They copy your site’s content and publish it across many websites and manipulate search engines.
Some attackers go beyond just duplicating the content and clone sites. Doing so will push Google to penalize your site.
Solution: Akin to social media listening tools, there are tools available to find if anyone duplicates your content.
Sites like Sitechecker are useful in busting duplicate content.
Most of these tools work in a similar fashion. All you need to do is enter your website URL, and you will be given a site audit report. Subscribing to premium versions of these tools will unlock more insights.
4) Removing Your Valuable Backlinks
This is another impersonation technique attackers use to shoot down your authoritative backlinks. They send requests to webmasters posing either as you or an agency representing your company.
They may cite reasons like Changes to Google’s algorithm for the request. Advanced attackers send Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) removal requests to Google.
There was this case wherein an attacker tried to take down more than 1,600 URLs of a website. Guess what? Google did remove a considerable number of URLs.
Solution: Never use an unprofessional email address to communicate with webmasters. An address that looks like smith@example.com is way more professional than smithfromexample@gmail.com. Also, categorize your backlinks by performance and use tools to monitor them.
5) Posting Fake Reviews
Posting fake bad reviews across social media and Google listings is another easy way attackers use to tarnish your brand image. Since reviewing a local business and service has been democratized by search engines, it has become easy for attackers to manipulate them. Sophisticated attackers use advanced bots to achieve this task.
Since search engines consider star-rating and reviews while ranking a site, fake negative reviews do make a dent in your reputation.
Even if search engines rank your site atop the search results, the supposedly bad reviews will negatively impact those who see your listing. Result: They end up giving a skip to your business and choosing someone else over you.
“If yours is a local business, the fake negative ratings can hurt you badly as Google’s rich snippets display star-rating in its SERPs”, says Cristian Ward CEO of San Diego SEO Inc
Solution: Actively monitoring your reviews is the only way to keep fake negative reviews at bay. Fortunately, search engines do give you the option to flag reviews that have malicious intent. Please don’t go overboard with this option.
At times, even genuine negative reviews may seem like fake ones. If a negative review is an honest one, addressing the customer issue would be a wise decision.
How to Find if Your Site is Suffering from Negative SEO?
1) Sudden Drop in Traffic
The obvious impact of a Negative SEO attack is a drastic drop in traffic. In some instances, the Attack was so lethal that websites lost millions of impressions and visits in a short period. In 2019, Sitecare, a brand management company, was attacked by black hat SE optimizers.
The attackers built tens of thousands of backlinks pointing toward Sitecare’s website. These links were from shady websites.
In a very few days, Sitecare’s traffic dropped drastically.
In the next 30 days, Sitecare dropped out for a range of essential keywords.
It was Google’s way of penalizing the site. The search engine was arm-twisted to think that Sitecare tried to game the algorithm. Hence the drop.
At times, the drop may not be visible to an untrained eye. But if you keep on tracking your traffic for a few weeks, there may be a gradual drop.
2) Slowdown in Loading Time
Another impact your site may experience in the event of a Negative SEO attack is a slowdown in loading time. Wrongdoers achieve this using Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks.
DDoS Attack is the technique of sending hundreds and hundreds of requests to your server until it crashes. As a result, the actual visitors to your site will not be able to access it. Those who are on the site will witness a poor browsing experience.
DDoS Attack has a cascading effect. Even as your server crashes, the attack will make Google unable to crawl your site. When crawling does not happen, your site will not get indexed.
3) Backlinks from Shady Websites
Keeping an eye on your backlinks is another way to keep attackers in check. If you find a reasonably large number of domains giving links to your site from a single IP address, it may be a Negative SEO attack.
Use a tool that can monitor the web round the clock and alert you in real time whenever a site is linking to you. In this way, you can immediately find if your site is under a Negative SEO attack.
If your site receives a high number of links from a country where your audiences are not available, it may be a Negative SEO attack.
Attackers usually target your site from the outside.
Another easy way to find if your site is under a spammy links attack is to look at a link’s Anchor Text. If the text is alien to your niche, it may be a spam link.
Ways to Prevent your site from Negative SEO
1) Choose Your SEO Agency Wisely
You may have the right intentions. But what if your SEO agency is not a fair player but indulges in black-hat SEO strategies? Don’t go for an SEO agency that promises you Page #1 ranking. None in the SEO world can promise that.
Some SEO agencies do involve in link-buying. They do it in a very discreet way. Be vigilant if they say they outsource the task of building links. The company they outsource may be a part of link spam schemes.
Stay away from the SEO companies that promise you a certain thousand links in exchange for a fixed amount.
2) Use Tools That Alert You
Start using Google Search Console. It will alert you if your site is under attack. Make sure you choose the “All Issues” option under the Type menu in Webmaster Preferences for alerts.
There are tools to keep an eye on your backlinks. These tools can alert you whenever your site earns and loses a link. This is incredibly important as knowing a threat at the very beginning will save you from a catastrophe.
Similar to Webmaster tools, a site-monitoring tool will email you on backlinks. If you have an overwhelming number of backlinks, tag important ones into categories for easy monitoring.
3) Audit, Audit, Audit
Though it sounds similar to monitoring, auditing your site goes deep and wide.
A complete site audit includes thoroughly scrutinizing your backlinks and scanning the web for copies of your pages. Tools that offer site audits also allow you to gather the backlinks in a .txt format and send them to Google for disavowing.
Auditing tools can also estimate the impact of the toxic elements on your site using various parameters and markers.
A site audit not only helps you find spammy backlinks but will tell you where your site scores and slips. It will negotiate your website and report to you about the flaws in design and UX.
Auditing also helps you in improving your SEO strategy. You will also get tailored recommendations to fix the flaws.
4) Watch Keywords’ Click Through Rate (CTR)
This is another clever attack on your site using bots. Sophisticated attackers program bots to search for keywords that your rank for. Then they will make the bots click all sites or the site of their target except yours.
This action, in turn, will make Google think that your website does not serve value for the concerned keywords. Hence, it will start not ranking your site for particular keywords.
Because Google intends to serve the most relevant results for the users, a low CTR will not make your site the apple of its eye. If not identified in the early stage, this attack may leave severe impacts on your site’s ranking.
Keep a close eye on your keywords’ CTR. If you find a sudden drop, consider using a legit CTR bot to regain the lost ranking.
5) Equip Your Site
Always remember the adage ‘Prevention is better than cure.’ Though the chances of your site getting hacked are slim compared to other forms of Negative SEO attacks, you can’t take a chance.
The first step is to register your site in Google Search Console. If your site’s security is compromised, Google will alert you. There are free tools available to check whether your site is hacked.
Updating your plugins and other third-party software associated with your site helps to an extent. Because developers of these tools update them for security and bug fixes, enabling automatic updates is important.
