Negative SEO is alive. It’s alive and it’s yet another “scary” SEO factor to keep an eye on. It may be happening to one of your sites at this very moment, secretly drawing unwanted attention.
So what is it?
I referred to negative SEO as “reverse SEO” recently in the post “Google Wants You To Delete Your Spammy Links, ASAP.”
Negative SEO is the practice of building (aka spamming) a boat load of links to a competitors site in order to get them penalized by Google. It’s a scary proposition when you think about the impact this could have in competitive environments.
Theoretically, right now, any of your sites that rank well could be in the process of getting ‘shot gunned” out of their position. All it takes is one savvy competitor with access to a lot of fast, cheap spam links, and they’re off to the races.
And who doesn’t have access to cheap, abundant links? Anyone ever heard of Fiverr.com?
Speaking of fiverr, there’s already a gig offering negative SEO. If it’s on fiverr it’s pretty safe to say that this concept has gone fairly mainstream. You can even find full blow websites dedicated to the service of negative SEO – negativeseo.me
Don’t think this is real? Just ask Dan Thies of seofaststart.com (a well known SEO guru in IM). Some smart underground fellas over on this forum started a negative SEO campaign on Dan’s site to see the effects (I gather there was some sort of “beef” with Dan, I’ve got no comment or skin in that game – only interested in the topic at hand).
Well the results are in and negative SEO was effective.
You can even see Dan looking for advice on how to deal with this attack here.
So what’s a webmaster to do?
That’s a great question that I don’t have a clear answer to right now. If you find yourself victim of such an attack I feel bad for you. Short of monitoring this activity with Google Webmaster Tools and requesting reinstatement directly from Google – I don’t know what else you can do.
Google’s been made aware of the situation. Hopefully in time this will disappear like markov written content from 2001. Until then, good luck to you.
Which side of the fence are you on? Will you shot gun your competition into oblivion? Or will you continue on doing what you’re doing?
How can Google possibly allow this?
It’s (many) disastaers waiting to happen, to many sites.
The serps IMO were okay in recent months, but now a great proportion of them today (after the update) are terrible, low quality sites such as old forum posts with outdated content, yahoo answers etc etc, and good quality dedicated sites appear to be losing out.
Good grief! It’s hard work to produce a successful website, and then have some malicious person(s) destroy it with negative SEO. Google can easily stop this by setting a limit on the number of progressive links it will recognize in a given period of time. Sure, there is a negative side to that approach, but what is worse than getting kicked off the first page compared to getting snuffed off the 100th page?
There would be no limit to the number of linked sites that could be aggregated over time … just a limit on how many could be accepted/recognized in a day, a week, or a month.
There is no perfect solution to this vicious practice, but some legal whiz will probably come up with an angle related to the interference of businesses (or business contracts) under the broad category of defamation.
Note, we all do have a contract(s) with hosting companies related to our websites (and technically with Google, Yahoo, etc. whether we like it our not; don’t they all have rules we have to follow?) You bet we do.).
Wow! This is scary and daunting for a newbie such as I.
Yes, it is not fair, however just like what most things in life. Isn’t it?
Just like the author mentioned, there’s no smart or efficient way to protect yourself from these “negative SEO” attacks and it’s hard for Google to trace if the spammy links are really legitimately forced unto you or if you actually built them yourself.
In the past, I remembered Google mentioned that unnatural links will not affect the ranking of one’s site. However, probably because of the sudden influx of unnatural and paid links, Google is having a second thought about it.
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