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.
WRITTEN BY
Annabelle Cochrane
MANAGING DIRECTOR & SEO SPECIALIST
Annabelle holds a Bachelor of Business (Marketing) from QUT and works directly with every ALC Consulting client. She’s based on the Sunshine Coast and works with businesses across Australia.
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