How to Combat & Recover from Negative SEO Attack: The Survival Guide

What Exactly is Negative SEO?

Negative SEO is when someone uses unethical, black hat techniques to harm a website’s rankings in the search results. Basically, they do everything Google says not to do in order to make it look you are violating Google policies. Although negative SEO can take different forms, here are some common ways your site can be attacked:

  • Building bad links to your site using unrelated keywords
  • Hacking your website to add malicious code
  • Creating fake social profiles of your company

Why Can Negative SEO be Risky?

Google can’t always tell the difference between a site being hit with negative SEO and an actual spammer, which is why you should always keep an eye on your websites links and traffic. Start-ups or new websites are generally not a target (but they can be); it is usually bigger websites that become the prey.

Google has started to address this issue and is now providing solutions through the Google Webmaster Tools and the Disavow tool. This is another reason why people tend to avoid taking a risk.

Bad Links

Your competitor can build bad links to your website by paying off a few dollars to adult sites, gambling sites, or a banned website. Creating a link farm is the easiest way to get you hit with a Google penalty. This is done by creating a group of websites that hyperlink to each other to increase the number of incoming links.

If a competitor does this aggressively enough, Google may ban your site. Some aggressive negative SEOs will only target to take down a specific page on the website by building low-quality links to a subpage.

Bad Links

Your competitor can build bad links to your website by paying off a few dollars to adult sites, gambling sites, or a banned website. Creating a link farm is the easiest way to get you hit with a Google penalty. This is done by creating a group of websites that hyperlink to each other to increase the number of incoming links.

If a competitor does this aggressively enough, Google may ban your site. Some aggressive negative SEOs will only target to take down a specific page on the website by building low-quality links to a subpage.

Identifying Bad Links: When there’s a relatively huge list of backlinks, it gets time-consuming to go through each one of them for the bad links identification purpose. Use tools like URL Profiler, CognitiveSEO, and Backlinks Monitor, to identify bad links and unnatural anchor text.

Disavow the Bad Links: After you have identified and made the list of the links to be removed, submit the data into the Disavow Tool. The Disavow Tool will label a link with a tag so that Google algorithm does not credit it to your site in a positive or negative way, but keep in mind there are mixed reports on the efficacy of the tool.

You can use the Disavow tool to disavow individual links or the whole domain. I recommend using the tool as the last resort. Here’s a complete guide on Identifying Bad Links and Pruning Them Using Google’s Disavow Tool.

Contact the Webmasters: The key point to understand is that disavowing a link won’t help you come out clean. You need to contact the domain webmasters and ask them to remove these links. Getting the contact details of all these bad links might take you several days. This is where tools such as URL Profiler and Rmoov come handy: