What Is Negative SEO?

Negative SEO refers to a set of malicious tactics used to deliberately damage a competitor’s search rankings, rather than improve one’s own.

Common Attacks

Typical negative SEO tactics include building large volumes of spammy, low-quality backlinks pointing at a target site to trigger a link-spam penalty, scraping and republishing a site’s content elsewhere to create duplicate content issues, hacking a site to inject harmful content or links, and submitting fake negative reviews at scale.

How to Protect Your Site

Regularly monitoring your backlink profile for sudden, unexplained spikes lets you catch a link-based attack early and disavow the offending links if needed. Keeping your site’s software and security current reduces the risk of hacking-based attacks, and monitoring your brand and content for unauthorized duplication helps catch scraping-based attempts before they cause lasting damage.

Table of Contents

Annabelle Cochrane

Managing Director / SEO Strategist

Annabelle is a qualified marketing specialist with over 6 years of hands-on experience providing service-based businesses with real, tangible, out-come based SEO campaigns. 

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