Editorial Staff
SEO is all about competition and implementing a good strategy in the long run. Sometimes, the competition in the web can be ruthless. It includes sabotaging the competing website or what we known as negative SEO.
In this module, we will explain all the possible negative SEO that can harm your site and how to combat them.
What is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO is a malicious practice aimed to sabotage the search ranking of competitor’s website.
If you have completed our SEO modules, we had covered the topic about black hat SEO practice that use some dirty method to get shortcut on the search engine.
While doing this black hat SEO could risk their own site on being penalized by Google, what if they done it to their competing site?
Their competing site ranking will drop, and their site will boost up to replace your position.
If you don’t treat and take action against your competitor’s negative SEO attack against you, you could end up losing some valuable traffic and search ranking.
Types of Negative SEO
Negative SEO consist in many forms, and all of them have the same aim: to destroy the competitor’s SEO.
1. Creating Toxic Backlinks That Pointing to Your Site
Link farms, backlinks from PBN site, and comment backlinks are commonly used to generate the toxic type of backlinks.
Devious competitors may use spam scripts that will post your URL in thousands of blog comments and forums. This will diminish the quality of your backlink footprint, as well as damaging your professional reputation.
Devious competitors may use spam scripts that will post your URL in thousands of blog comments and forums. This will diminish the quality of your backlink footprint, as well as damaging your professional reputation.
Please refer our guide to disavow the toxic backlinks here.
2. Duplicating Your Site
Google is against duplicate content on the web and will give the credit to whoever first published the content.
But how does Google determine who is the one post first? Post date? The moment you published the post?
Unfortunately, not all of them.
Google determine who is the first by the first time crawl basis. Remember our previous lesson on how do search engines work?
The process of the search engine to recognize a page is if they’re able to crawl your site.
So, it doesn’t matter if you post a new content today, and your competitor is copying your content and publish it 3 days later. If the search engine crawl your competitor’s content first before you, Google will still give credit to your competitor and mark your content as the duplicate.
Is not fair isn’t it? Although you’re the original content creator, but you’re being marked as duplicate, while your competitor’s copy and paste content can rank on Google.
The solution to combat this is ensure that your page crawl is fast enough so that your competitor’s are not able to get crawled before you.
We recommend you to request indexing in Google Search Console each time you published a new content. This way, you’re telling Google to prioritize crawling your page.
3. Get Your Site Banned on Popular Websites
Community sites are increasingly good at filtering out spammy URLs. Digg and Reddit are reluctant to ban a URL, but they could make it impossible for flagged URLs to see any traffic.
Unfortunately, it’s fairly simple for competitors to sabotage your domains by repeatedly submitting your worst content under a false account. They can accelerate the process by registering a few accounts at each site using the same IP, then voting for your content using their multiple accounts.
Most social media sites will think that you’re trying to artificially promote your content, so they will ban your domain from their system.
4. Sending Tons of False Click to Your Site
Google prohibits false clicks and visitors including buying visitors from the bot system.
The black hat SEO aware of this and use this opportunity to bring down the competitor’s site by sending tons of false click to the site.
This can be resulted in many ways such as your site will be banned from AdSense and AdWords, and makes you lose tremendous amount of money.
False clicks and visitors are also highly related to high bounce rate since it is bot that just click the site and leave afterwards with the same IP address.
When Google spot that your page has a high bounce rate with high clicks, it giving signal that your site isn’t great for the readers and therefore, rank your page down.
5. Posting Fake Negative Reviews About Your Website
This negative SEO tactic includes sending tons of fake negative reviews about your site in Google reviews.
Semrush shared the case where a business had its Google My business rating drop from 4.5 rating to 2.8 rating in less than two weeks.
A user or series of users posted seventeen 1-star reviews or ratings for a Google My Business listing. This review attack was extremely upsetting for the business owner who felt completely helpless with what to do.
In this case, you can document all the profiles and links to each reviews and contacted GMB support. It might take several weeks for them to reply and if they find it valid, they will remove it.
Bottom Line
Negative SEO is indeed harmful and deadly for your website. If you did not take any necessary pre-caution or action to solve it, you will end up losing tons of valuable traffic.
Constantly checking your site health is the key. Remember, negative SEO can attack in any time.
