Negative SEO is the unfair and illegal way that some companies use to harm the web positioning of their competitors and clear the way to achieve greater visibility of their website.
Negative SEO or black hat SEO brings together a series of techniques that are used to attack a web page or eCommerce with the aim of reducing its visibility by negatively affecting its web positioning. It consists of applying actions to a certain website so that Google penalizes it and obtains worse positions in the SERPs or results pages.
SEO has the meaning of Search Engine Optimization or search engine optimizer. Therefore, a negative SEO attack pursues that a website has a poor optimization in the face of search engines, and specifically in Google.
Types of negative SEO attacks
There are various forms of attack on the SEO positioning of a website. The most common are:
Toxic Backlinks
Incoming links to a website are very important to get a good position in Google. These types of links mark the authority of the website, that is, how users see that website and the importance they give it. If you have links from sites with a lot of authority, the web will obtain a better web positioning and will increase its own domain authority.
A negative SEO technique is to get links from toxic websites (which have been penalized by Google for breaches of its policies) and point to a certain website. In this way, a negative transfer of domain authority is achieved, causing the website to decrease its authority, and therefore lose weight in the Google ranking.
Theft of content
Another technique widely used in black hat SEO is to steal content from a website and publish it on a web of dubious prestige. The objective is for Google robots to detect this duplicate content and end up penalizing the site in its web positioning.
Fake reviews and opinions
Although these attacks do not directly affect web positioning, they do have a direct and notable impact on the reputation of the web or the brand. They consist of leaving faulty reviews on a website in order to create a bad image of it to other users.
Hack a website
This technique consists of gaining administrator access to the website's management panel. If this degree of control is achieved, all kinds of changes can be made in order to negatively affect the web positioning of the site (reducing its performance, including links with errors and other similar actions).
Detect, prevent and defend against a negative SEO attack
Detecting negative SEO attacks is usually not an easy task. If you begin to lose positions or the authority of the website begins to decline without any apparent explanation, you can suspect that you have received a black hat SEO attack.
In order to prevent and protect yourself from this type of malicious attack, a series of actions can be carried out:
- Protect access to the web. Properly granting permissions and privileges to users accessing the admin panel minimizes the chances of access credentials being stolen and a malicious third party taking control of the website. It is also important to use a strong password policy and be on the lookout for phishing or identity theft email or SMS attacks.
- Check and remove toxic links. From Google Search Console you can see the links that point to the website and disavow and eliminate those that are considered toxic or that may be damaging the website before Google.
- Check for duplicate content. With tools such as Copyscape or Siteliner it is possible to verify if content has been stolen from a website. A report of this situation can then be sent to Google so that it can take appropriate action.
- Respond to fake reviews. The best way to combat this type of attack is to always answer negative comments and unmask the authors of false reviews, in this way the rest of users will be aware that those comments on the website are not relevant.
Date update on 2021-10-18. Date published on 2021-10-18. Category: Computer class Author: Oscar olg Fuente: seoestudios