Lately, there is a lot of talk in the SEO world about negative SEO attacks, but do you know what negative SEO is? Should you be concerned about this new practice? Do you know if your website is receiving a negative SEO attack or has already been attacked?
The idea of this article is to help those Webmasters who are receiving negative SEO attacks, as well as those who want to protect their website or blog against future attacks.
What is negative SEO?
Negative SEO is based on applying a series of unethical techniques (Black Hat), to sabotage the ranking and organic positioning of a direct competitor in search results. These techniques and attacks that are carried out are penalized by the search engines.
Therefore, if the search engine algorithm detects these bad practices, it will penalize the sites and Webs that are carrying them out, reducing their organic ranking and positioning, or even making them disappear completely from the search results.
Is there Negative SEO?
I do not hesitate to affirm that yes, it exists, and worst of all, it is very easy and simple to execute. There are pages like Fivver or Seoclerks where people advertise offering negative SEO services. If we search Seoclerks for the term « Negative SEO » we can see how negative SEO services appear to us from $ 25, so it requires little investment in time and money to carry out or carry out a negative SEO attack.
Types of negative SEO attacks
Negative SEO attacks can be carried out and manifested in several different ways. Among the most common practices are:
1. Toxic Links: Generation and construction of hundreds or thousands of toxic and spam links on low-quality web pages that will target your website with anchors with delicate or penalized terms such as casin **, viag **, sex ***.
2. Website piracy: they take advantage of a vulnerability in your site and gain access to it, and once they are inside they can execute all kinds of bad practices (generate outgoing links to other websites, redirects to pages of dubious reputation). You can check if your website has been hacked from Google Search Console> Security Problems
3. Online reputation: Creation of false email accounts and social profiles that will leave negative comments and reviews about your brand. They usually make these negative reviews in services such as Google My Business, Trusted Shops.
4. Copy content: copying the content of your website and distributing it throughout the Internet, publishing on pages of dubious reputation or already penalized by algorithms.
5. Web server overload: it consists of overloading the resources of the Web server based on requests, which means that your server collapses, not being able to attend to all requests and causing the loading times of the web to increase.
6. Backlink Removal: Removing the best backlinks and links that point to your website.
There are a series of guidelines and recommendations that we must implement to prevent and combat a negative SEO attack.
Although this will not guarantee 100% that our site can receive an attack, it will make it more difficult to carry out this type of attack on our website or blog.
Negative SEO refers to the practice of using black hat and unethical techniques to sabotage a competitor's rankings in search engines. Negative SEO attacks can take a number of different forms: Hacking your website. Building hundreds or thousands of spammy links to your website.