Jun 3, 2014

Are you familiar with Negative SEO?

Posted by Wendy Weber

I wasn’t.

It is an ugly practice.

Negative SEO is the practice of deliberately buying and directing low-quality links to a website in order to harm a competitor. This may result in a Google penalty that is certainly undeserved. Although Google has said that it “works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking, or have your site removed from their index,” it is at best an annoyance and at worst truly detrimental to the targeted website.

I am told that new websites, especially in a competitive niche, are particularly vulnerable. It’s important to monitor your inbound links at least once a month, as identifying negative SEO attacks early on makes it easier to address them. If attacked, you must submit disavows for both Google and Bing, and if you have lost traffic you will need to submit a reconsideration request as well.

It’s a sorry state of affairs that this practice exists. But identifying it and addressing it promptly is your best defense.

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