SEO attacks are every online business owner’s nightmare. There is a sudden drop in your ranking position. Your website, which is active and maintained, suddenly registers a lot of traffic, and it slows down significantly. Your keyword rankings show a sudden drop. Or your comments area shows a bunch of spammy links. Oh no! Is that a negative SEO attack? A quick look at Google Analytics shows you the source of the SEO spam backlinks that are pointing to your website. It’s time to take action.
What is negative SEO?
Negative SEO is a malicious web engineering practice aimed at damaging the search engine rankings of a website. It is also known as black hat SEO or adverse SEO. Adverse SEO is basically trying to achieve the opposite of what an online business owner wishes to achieve with their on-page and off-page white hat SEO techniques.
Negative SEO can have bitter end results, costing victims losses in conversions every day, reducing victims’ online authority, and depleting valuable backlinks that were painstakingly built up over time.
Most discussions about negative SEO center around malevolent SEO practices carried out intentionally by competitors to put a competing business down. However, some businesses attempt to help their website rise up in the SERPs by using guaranteed SEO services and achieve the opposite. Furthermore, inexperienced web developers could also unintentionally stumble into attempting apparently ‘easy-win solutions’ that are actually black hat practices. Google continuously updates its search algorithm, and technology has advanced, making deliberate negative SEO attacks less possible. However, it is still vital for website owners to be aware of the types of negative SEO attacks possible and how to protect their websites.
Types of negative SEO attacks
There are several different types of negative SEO attacks. Here are some of the main malicious negative SEO tactics that can damage a site’s SEO.
- Modifying redirects – Every site may have some redirect pages, for example, to account for spelling errors in user input, and a site does not get penalized for a small amount for redirects to error pages. But if a site has many redirects, redirects to empty pages, or suffers from redirects pointing from bad websites to the victim’s website, it can cause a loss of PageRank and a loss of web traffic.
- Altering the robots.txt file – If an attacker has access to the robot.txt file and reconfigures it to tell site crawlers not to crawl your important pages or even not to crawl the whole website, it will drastically affect your rankings.
- Fake negative reviews – Posting fake negative reviews on various websites or social media outlets can cause a drop in customer trust and a reduction in sales and significantly damage your online reputation. Fake negative reviews online can also reduce a site’s visibility in the SERPS when they signal to Google a lack of credibility and authority. In 2021, 62% of consumers identified fake reviews about local business.
- Website hacking – Hacking a website in any way that stops it from being visible to the search engines is an adverse SEO attack. One way of doing this is when hackers put malicious code into website data. All types of hacking are damaging, and website owners should take sufficient steps to protect their sites from hacking. Accenture tells us that from 2020 to 2021, there was a 31% increase in hacking attacks. Checkpoint tells us that global cyber attacks increased by 38% from 2021 to 2022.
- Backlink manipulation – Spammy backlinks in a blog or forum’s comment area sometimes contain bad words. Are negative words bad for SEO? They certainly can be, as Google is dedicated to giving the user the best possible web experience. Also, anchor text normally helps search engines to know which are the most relevant keywords a page should rank for. Over-optimized anchor text (using too many keyword-rich phrases) in fake backlinks can hurt your search engine rankings as it signals to Google that such anchor text may not be genuine. You can check backlink anchor text at https://www.duplichecker.com/anchors-text-distribution.php.
- DDoS attacks – DDoS stands for distributed denial-of-service. A DDoS attack is a malevolent request for service when a hugely overwhelming number of service requests are intentionally made to a site. The flood of requests chokes and disables servers, sometimes reaching the point of physical damage to the server. Besides the site security becoming compromised, as all efforts are directed at getting the site back online, the URL(s) under attack becomes unreachable, and the website becomes slow. This has a negative effect on organic search engine rankings since Google will temporarily remove the site from SERPs.
Ways to discover and expose negative SEO attacks:
Check your website’s SEO rankings and other vital metrics frequently to spot the possibility of a security breach. Here are some recommended tips:
- Conduct an SEO audit at least every 2 to 6 months. This is especially important for small businesses or businesses with newer websites that do not yet have many high-quality backlinks pointing to their website. Many pros recommend conducting a walk through the site on a weekly basis to check everything is in order.
- Look out for email notifications from your security plugins or Google Search Console.
- Check what the search engines are saying about your site: Are your rankings in the range of normal?
- Regularly monitor your online reputation. Check what people are saying about your business in the reviews. Whether it is in social media or a feedback request sent to your customers, find out about how your customers feel about your product or service. If there is discontent, you could resolve it before it ever becomes a malicious attack.
- Use a plagiarism tool like Copyscape to check for internal and external content duplication.
7 ways to protect your website from negative SEO
1. Claim authenticity of original content: Always submit freshly published content to Google Search Console so that your original authorship is registered. In the event of content duplication, the ownership verification will only work to your benefit.
2. Make the most out of the tools available in Google Search Console: Set up the Google Search Console (GSC) Email Alert. Check the Core Web Vitals that map out user experience over time. You can monitor your site’s overall performance, get indexing and other error reports, and enhance website security. GSC used to be known as Google Webmaster Tools.
3. Monitor website vitals regularly: Use a free tool like Google Analytics to monitor bounce rates, engagement time, exit rates, and all traffic channels. Be alert to red flags.
4. Check for scraped content and identity theft: Use tools like Copyscape that show you if your content is duplicated. Additionally, use a tool such as DNSTwist to rule out cybersquatters (which include typosquatting, identity theft, name jacking, and reverse cybersquatting).
5. Regularly monitor your backlink profile and disavow any spammy or suspicious backlinks. You can use free tools like Ahrefs and Open Site Explorer or more advanced premium tools like LRT, MonitorBacklinks, and Semrush as part of your efforts to check if someone is adding low-quality backlinks to your site.
6. Protect your online reputation. Use an online reputation management system (ORM system). There are free versions, such as ReputationDefender, or premium ones, such as Birdeye and Podium. Flag and report any fake negative reviews in your Business Profile on Google. Contact support-in@google.com for any support-related questions.
7. Focus on security to protect your site from malware and hackers. There are many security plugins – neilpatel.com recommends the Google Authentication plugin. Check out the best ones for your site and look at reviews before applying plugins.
How WebDriveSeo helps businesses detect and prevent the effects of negative SEO
WebDriveSEO is an expert SEO agency with years of experience helping businesses of all sizes set up their websites for the best possible rankings in search engines. WebdriveSEO promotes a powerful and robust white-hat SEO policy. We are dedicated to detecting negative SEO attacks by analyzing your SEO metrics regularly and maintaining your website health.
Although initially, negative SEO is barely noticeable – certainly not at the user end of the website – our article has shown that it can have a devastating effect on SEO metrics if you allow it to develop. Let the experts prevent damage to your website’s SEO with expert SEO services so your business can thrive.
Contact us today to schedule a FREE discovery call and find out what we can do to protect your website from real or potential malicious SEO.
Negative SEO FAQs
Why are negative SEO attacks difficult to spot and prove?
Generally, negative SEO attacks don’t look like hacking attacks might appear. The site owner only realizes they have been hit when they see their rankings have dropped. Time delays between initiation and activation could make it harder to discover where the attack originated. In DDoS attacks, for example, the source of the problem is hard to trace as the attack comes from multiple directions. Some attacks do not come in a big flood but in gradual steps, so you cannot pinpoint immediately that it is an attack.
What does Google say about negative SEO?
Google has guidelines for negative SEO. For example, fake negative reviews are actually a violation of Google’s guidelines. Perpetrators can be penalized by having their RichResults confiscated, having pages removed from Search Results, and maybe even being banned. When determining whether negative words are bad for SEO settings, Google is making more of an effort to protect honest web users and put down malicious ones.
Is negative SEO a real threat?
While it is controversial, negative SEO is a real threat to all website owners. Online businesses absolutely have to protect their sites from potential attacks with techniques to prevent and cure any malicious attacks. However, as negative SEO attacks become more common, search engines become smarter too. The algorithms now protect website owners more, for example, by enabling fake negative reviews to be rebutted and by providing the disavow tool to repel poisonous backlinks. The general consensus among SEO experts is that nurturing a healthy and robust white-hat SEO program will give sites better rankings and protect them from possible negative SEO practices.
