What is a Negative SEO Attack

PorRodrigo Ramirez

Mar 6, 2021 #Cybersecurity

The threat of negative SEO is remote but overwhelming. Negative SEO is a set of activities aimed at lowering a competitor’s ranking in search results. These activities are usually off the page but in some cases, they can also involve hacking the site and modifying its content.

Negative SEO is not the most likely explanation for a sudden ranking drop. Before deciding that someone may be deliberately damaging your ranking, consider the most common reasons for ranking drops.

There are different forms of negative SEO which companies should be aware of such as:

▸Heavy Spam

One or two spam links may not affect a site’s ranking. This is why negative SEO attacks generally involve building links from a group of interconnected sites or link farms. Typically, most of these links use the same anchor text. These exact match anchors may have nothing to do with the attacked site; Or they can include a niche keyword to make the site link profile look like the owner is tampering with it.

▸Hacking a website

It is an effective tactic. And very expensive. As you can see below, by hacking a website, the attacker can undermine its SEO performance as desired. If the type of hack results in loss of visibility in search engines, then it can be classified as a negative SEO attack.

▸False negative reviews on a website

This tactic can work to ruin the reputation of a website (or brand), therefore, it can cause traffic drops due to these false publications since they speak badly of your content even if they have not or seen it.

▸Forced drag

There are examples of desperate site owners trying to block a competitor’s site by dragging it hard and causing a heavy load on the server. If the Googlebot is unable to access your site multiple times in a row, it may be declassified.

If you are the owner of a site you should take this article into account because if you have a loss of reputation this may be one of the reasons and it is best to take stockings before it is too late.

Check also:
What we understand about SEO Poisoning