Negative SEO tools are tools that allow you to manipulate Google’s search results for your own benefit.
These tools can be used to manipulate the rankings of other websites, which can be very detrimental to those sites.
Negative SEO tools are often used by competitors to make sure their competitors don’t rank well in search engines.
In this post, we will explain what negative SEO is and how it works.
Negative Seo Tools
In this article, we are going to talk about negative SEO — what it is, how harmful it may be, and what you could do to detect and tackle a possible negative SEO attack.
What is Negative SEO?
First, let us define what is Negative SEO and what it implies.
Negative SEO is any malicious practice aimed at sabotaging search rankings of a competitor’s website. This is generally considered “black hat SEO” for its malevolent nature.
An example of a negative SEO service offer in a Reddit thread.
GSA SER (GSA Search Engine Ranker) is a tool for automated spammy link building.
Types of Negative SEO Attacks
Another example of a negative SEO service offer.
There are different forms of negative SEO. In this article, we will cover the most common tactics associated with negative SEO.
1. Hacking a Website
This might be the most efficient, yet costly tactic. As seen below, by hacking a website an attacker can undermine a site’s SEO performance however they wish. If it is the type of hack that results in a loss of search engine visibility, it can be deemed a negative SEO attack.
The answer above was posted in a Google Search Console Help Center. Click to view the thread.
2. Creating Toxic Backlinks with Spammy Anchor Texts Pointing to the Website
Link farms, automated software, and PBNs (public blog networks) are widely used for generating these types of bad links. The number of links may vary – from a few hundred to thousands.
An example of a negative SEO attack using toxic backlinks. Click to view the thread.
3. Scraping a Website’s Content and Creating Duplicates of the Website
This practice is based around creating duplicates of websites or parts of its content, hotlinking, and spreading the fakes across the web.
A question about a negative SEO attack using content duplication and website cloning. Click to view the thread in Google Search Console Help Center.
4. Posting Fake Negative Reviews About the Website
This tactic may work for ruining a website’s (or brand’s) reputation, therefore, it could lead to traffic drops.
A Google Search Console Help Center thread about suspected fake review posting. Click to view the thread.
5. Removing a Website’s Backlinks by Sending out Fake Removal Requests to Webmasters
Attackers may target your backlink profile in an effort to harm your SERP positions. They might pretend to be you or an agency acting on your behalf and get in touch with the webmasters to persuade them to remove the links pointing to your site.
An example of a fake backlink removal request. Click to view the source.
Some negative SEO practices go even further, for example, sending fake DMCA removal requests but these cases are rare. The tactics above are the most common for negative SEO.
NOTE: The DMCA is a United States copyright law that provides guidelines for online service provider safe harbor in case of copyright infringement. Google has a special report form for that.
Before we dig deeper, it is important to stress that the very concept of negative SEO is debatable. Let us look into the reasons for that.
Why Negative SEO Attacks Can Be Difficult to Spot and Prove
Spotting and proving a negative SEO attack is tricky, especially if a website’s backlink profile already contained a bunch of toxic links and/or the site’s content is poor.
Very often, webmasters that believe they are a victim of negative SEO will not take into account the other conditions that could cause a drop in rankings, such as:
- An update in Google’s algorithms/Core Algorithm Update.
- Getting filtered out by Google’s algorithmic filtering.
Sometimes these drops are mistaken for negative SEO. Marie Haynes, SEO Consultant at MarieHaynes.com, said the following about that:
We have had many clients who thoroughly believed they were suffering ranking drops because a competitor built unnatural links pointing at their site. In almost every case, we could find another more plausible explanation for the ranking drops.
This means you should not jump to conclusions about why your rankings dropped.
To avoid any possible impact of updates in algorithms and algorithmic filtering, you should always ensure the quality of your content is up to Google’s guidelines and you are looking after your backlink profile.
Auditing your backlinks is highly important since you may already have a backlink profile that Google’s filtering may consider spammy (containing unnatural links). You can learn more about tackling algorithmic filtering from the experts interviewed on our blog.
Some webmasters miss these factors and judge straightaway that their website suffered a negative SEO attack. As John Mueller puts it:
Usually, the cases where I see that something around the negative SEO is happening are kind of the cases, when you would look at them manually, you would say, well, this looks like maybe someone has built these links up over the past. And it’s not really the competitor but maybe an SEO that has been working for the company.
Thus, your website’s content should always be optimized, engaging, user-oriented, and your backlink profile must be kept as trustworthy and clean as possible.
Why the Efficiency of Negative SEO is Arguable
Google doubts that negative SEO, especially the intentional generation of bad backlinks, is an efficient practice.
Click to view the Twitter thread.
So, is an efficient negative SEO attack even possible?
The answer is, it depends.
Google is very good at distinguishing between backlinks that you created and toxic links that appeared out of the blue. Yet, it might be easier to sabotage a website that already has thin content and a poorly attended backlink profile because the attacker will just be putting more fuel on the fire.
At the same time, a quality website may suffer a negative SEO attack too but it may turn to be a costly and time-consuming endeavor for the attacker. An attack must be thoroughly designed and carried out intelligently to be really effective.
Marie Haynes explains:
If a competitor was building a spammy link to your site it would be extremely expensive and would have more of a chance of helping your rankings rather than hurting them. […] In all of my years of auditing links and helping websites who have experienced traffic drops, I can only recall one case where I truly felt that links built via negative SEO were the culprit.
How to Detect and Suppress a Negative SEO Attack
An attacker could combine multiple efforts in order to make your website fall off the SERPs. To minimize the consequences of such an attack, here are some pre-emptive actions that you can consider.
Preventing a Website From Hacking
For negative SEO to work in this case, it is unlikely the hacker will hijack your website entirely. You may still have full access to your website while an attacker has installed various spammy signals that you might not detect. For example, messing with robots.txt or sitemap could hurt your site without you noticing any obvious change right away.
In order to detect security breaches, you can set up notifications in Google Search Console and regularly run site audits to fix any technical issues.
Also, you can use this simple tool that provides a top-level overview telling you if there are any signs of your website being hacked.
Finally, you can use The FTC Complaint Assistant to report a hacking.
Combating Fake Backlinks
John Mueller on disavowing links. Click to view the original tweet.
Google may not see Negative SEO as a serious black hat SEO tactic but, according to John Mueller, using the Disavow tool may be a good thing if you think you were hit by a negative SEO attack when someone is generating toxic links pointing to your site.
As seen from the comment above shared on the r/SEO subreddit, some users say disavowing works when tackling negative SEO.
But what are you supposed to do when someone is generating thousands of toxic backlinks that point to your site? You will need to disavow them with the same process of fixing a manual action from Google.
In all the cases you should go manually link by link, collect them according to criteria, and disavow.
How Fake Link Building Works
Below are two examples of negative SEO campaigns based on generating toxic backlinks.
Example #1
In the span of three months starting from October 2018, a small business company faced a sudden spike in the number of backlinks pointing at their website. The number of backlinks grew immensely from 275 to 341,824.
This unnatural spike resulted in a manual action from Google. The webmaster then had to run an in-depth backlink audit and submit reconsideration requests to Google together with the disavow files.
It took two reconsideration requests to get the penalty lifted – and it was removed by August 2019, almost one year later.
In the second request, the webmaster emphasized that this was a negative SEO attack, and that might have helped to clear things up and get the penalty removed. As of today, the rankings are still being restored.
Example #2
Another suspected negative SEO attack that continues to this day actually might be targeting the SEMrush website. Starting from November 2019, we have been detecting a spike in toxic backlinks being posted on identical websites. Below is an example of such a website.
This suspicious activity did not bring obvious negative results but is still keeping us a little busy watching out for these unexpected backlinks. Most of these links are targeting a non-existing page.
How Do You Protect a Website From Fake Backlinks?
Here is a summary of actions to take:
- Use the Backlink Audit tool for your website regularly and watch out for the Toxic Score metric to detect any suspicious changes in your backlink profile.
- Check the value and trend of your website’s Authority Score. A drop in the score may indicate that there is something wrong with your backlink profile.
- Regularly update your disavow file if you get new toxic backlinks that you do not have a chance to remove.
Spotting Scraped Content and Website Doppelgangers
Identical content not only triggers cannibalization issues but can also result in websites or specific pages getting completely filtered out in the search results.
Attackers may duplicate your whole website or some parts of it to sabotage your search performance.
In order to detect malicious behavior related to copying your content or the entire website, audit the web regularly using tools like Copyscape or Siteliner.
If you spot a fraudulent website that copycats yours, consider doing the following:
- Contact the provider where the fake website is hosted and explain why it must be taken down.
- Use this Google form to report it and demand it is taken down.
- Use The FTC Complaint Assistant to report the imposter.
Finding and Reporting Fake Negative Reviews About Your Website
The impact of posting fake reviews varies depending on the case. Fake reviews will hardly ruin the reputation of a large retail company but could hurt a small business company.
According to Google, reviews do impact your SERP performance, and fake reviews can harm it.
Making people fall for such feedback demands time and well-crafted “reviews”. Spreading negativity may result in the website’s reputation declining and, thus, its traffic may go down.
To do this, an attacker must try really hard to ruin the reputation of a website, and there is no guarantee this effort will work. Still, you should look out for such activity by monitoring online reviews.
If a review is definitely fake, you should report it to the site’s administration where the “review” was published. You can read more about this negative SEO practice in the article about a case of a fake review attack.
Reporting Fake Backlink Removal Requests
Watch out for your backlinks, especially your most valued ones. You never know when an attacker might start sending out fake removal requests asking your referring domain to remove links.
There is no guarantee that a webmaster where the backlink was posted will not follow such fraudulent requests.
To swiftly detect the disappearance of valuable links, you can set up notifications to track any lost and found backlinks in SEMrush Backlink Audit tool.
anti seo
Google’s Matt Cutts announced the release of the much-anticipated ‘disavow links’ tool that allows website owners to ask Google to reconsider devaluing their site as a result of bad backlinks. One of the fears that the search engine optimization trend has instilled in business owners is the possibility of anti-SEO, also called negative SEO.
Anti-SEO is the practice of snuffing out your competition by using techniques that manipulate search engine results. Skewed results could include targeting a specific site to hurt their search engine ranking, aiming to hurt the reputation of another by setting up sites, bad reviews, or generally negative press. Another more subtle way for a competitor or angry customer to achieve anti-SEO results will be to launch an attack by purchasing bad backlinks to set off the Google alarms on your page. Anti-SEO techniques could also be used in turn as a counter attack against these results.
Traditionally a website with an enormous amount of terrible backlinks would result in your website being banned, but with the addition of the disavow tool, it seems as though Google is becoming more democratic by allowing these websites a standing chance. Google will probably send you a notification and decrease your page rank, but you still have the opportunity to get it back given that you remove the bad links.
While there are many ways and reasons to engage in anti-SEO it will be interesting to see what the progress within this area will be after the disavow tool. If a competing business sets up a negative campaign against you by posting negative reviews on Yelp for instance, the disavow tool wont be much help to you. However, if a competitor created a site that identifies your business by using a link or purchases tons of bad backlinks for your website, then you will be able to have them cleared and regain your position once you identify and remove which ones they are.
Anti-SEO may still haunt the dreams of some high up on search engine rankings along with all the detriments that come along with it. Even still, the potential for removing these links and getting a second chance by Google is enough to yield peace of mind depending on your situation. It will still be a nightmare to locate and remove thousands of bad backlinks as long as the disavow tool does not help you identify which ones are the rotten eggs. Does the disavow tool eliminate the potential threat, deeming anti-SEO even more unworthy of time-spend making it irrelevant, or will anti-SEO evolve to a new way? Who is to say that Google’s disavow tool cannot be used as a weapon to aid anti-SEO efforts in the future?
Conclusion
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