Byusing black hat techniques in order to illicitly rank your own site higher up search engine results pages (SERPs), negative SEO is about using similar underhanded techniques to attack a rival’s website and scupper their ranking.
This can be done a number of ways…
- Pointing hundreds of low-quality, spam-heavy links to your website, particularly ones using particularly unsavoury keywords or ones that are nothing to do with your content.
- Copying your website’s content and distributing it around the Internet, therefore placing you at risk of transgressing Google’s ‘duplicate content’ policy. As follows...
"In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results".
- Crippling your website speed by sending thousands of requests per second to your server.
- If you have quality back-links from other authority sites, someone could potentially get in touch with those sites and using your name and details ask to have them removed.
- Negative SEO can also refer to website hacking. From removing content or even deleting your site entirely, to changing the robots.txt file to tell search engines to stop crawling it.
- It can also be about damaging your reputation, perhaps through fake social media accounts set up to specifically badmouth your company.
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