How To Do Negative SEO Attack

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How To Do Negative SEO Attack
We all know that ever since the release of
Penguin Algorithm Update, Google deals harsh
penalties for websites that use black hat SEO
techniques, so heres an idea to keep you up at
night What if a malicious party (say, your
closest competitor) starts using those techniques
on your site just to try and get you
penalized? This, ladies and gentlemen, is
something that is commonly known as Negative
SEO. Top of Form- What Is Negative
SEO? Negative SEO is the act of using Black Hat
SEO on other websites in order to get them
penalized by Google. Negative SEO can also
include reducing the effectiveness of a
websites SEO properties by disabling or altering
them.
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Dealing with Negative SEO tactics can be quite
tricky since some of them is out of your
control, like pointing bad links (a.k.a link
bomb) to your site. Another thing is, they are
also a bit hard to detect. Unlike some hacking
practices that aims to deface or simply take down
a website, a Negative SEO attack doesnt affect
a websites look and feel. Instead, the effects
are only apparent once your website takes a dip
in search ranking and incoming traffic. But Why
Would Anyone Commit A Negative SEO
Attack? Similar to hackers, people who do
Negative SEO attacks might do it for various
reasons. It can be intentional, such as
sabotaging a competitors website, extortion or
simply for fun. And believe it or not, an
unintentional Negative SEO attack can also
happen. There are cases where family members,
employees or even hired SEO agencies deliberately
do obsolete Black Hat practices on behalf of the
owner thinking it will help their website
ranking. Types Of Negative SEO Attack Just like
normal SEO, Negative SEO also have both on-page
as well off-page aspect to it Negative Off-Page
SEO As the name implies, Negative Off-Page SEO
attacks without internally changing your
website. Mostly it revolves around using Black
Hat or negative SEO link building practices and
point them to the target website
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Link farms are a series of web pages created for
the sole purpose of linking to another page on
the web. Ordinarily, inbound links are a good
thing that help to improve your sites ranking
but if you have a lot of links coming in from
same unrelated, spammy websites, it tells Google
that you are trying to artificially increase the
number of links pointing to your page by creating
link farms and you will get penalized.
In a Negative SEO attack, malicious parties will
create obvious link farms and heavily link to
the target website. Sometimes they will also
purchase link farm services or buy site-wide ads
to achieve the same effect. Since its hard for
Google to tell whos responsible for the links,
it can lead to a Google penalty on the target
site when detected. Copyright complaints are a
bit more complex, but at their core, they usually
involve a someone claiming that youve posted
material that belongs to them. In many cases,
this can result in an automatic removal of the
page for up to 10 days and wouldnt it be just
awful if your landing pages vanished right in the
middle of your biggest campaigns?
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Finally, competitors can falsify duplicate
content basically just copying and pasting your
web pages over and over, maybe even as part of
those link farms we discussed above. An influx of
duplicated contents across domains might signal a
manipulation attempt to get multiple different
websites ranking with the same content. This used
to be a popular Black Hat SEO technique before
Google started cracking down on it.
As you can see, there are many different ways for
negative SEO techniques to be done to your
website but no matter how tempting they might
be, you should never even consider doing any of
these yourself. Even if it works in the
short-term, its not going to be effective
forever and could land you in serious legal
trouble if anyone can prove you were behind
it. Negative On-Page SEO This form of attack is
a little different, and generally focuses on
hacking into your site and changing things
around. With as little as a few minutes to start
messing with your setup, a hacker could easily
disrupt your sites coding, introduce viruses,
and generally wreak havoc on everything youve
tried to build. The real threats are the ones
that are hard to see, though, and consist of the
following Negatively altering your SEO
properties Lets be honest are you really that
likely to notice if someone changes all the alt
text on your pictures to be less effective? A lot
of basic SEO techniques are intended to be set
and forget, and thats what can leave you
vulnerable to on-page negative SEO
strategies. Changing the Robots.txt This is
easily one of the most important files on your
site when it comes to SEO because it tells
crawlers how to interact with your site. It is
normally used to
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tell Google which part you dont want them to
crawl and index such as a live but unfinished
page. An attacker with access to your site can
easily modify the robot.txt to tell Google to
ignore important pages or even the whole website.
Modifying Redirects Search engines have an
opinion on certain error pages namely, theyre
bad. Sites that automatically redirect from bad
pages generally arent penalized too much, but
if your redirects are changed, disabled, or
scrambled, you could find yourself plummeting
down the ratings. The good news, as well discuss
later, is that on-page negative SEO attacks are
much harder to perform and much easier for a
competent programming team to fix, too.
The Likelihood of Negative SEO Attacks
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With all the stuff weve talked about here, you
might be worried that theres a rampant amount
of negative SEO going on and you just havent
caught up to it yet. Well not exactly. Google
is quite good at detecting when negative SEO is
occurring. For example, if someones trying to
do some Google Bowling and smash you over with
site-wide links, theres a good chance that the
link from that site will only be counted as one
vote from them unlikely to do you any real
harm. Also, remember that while Google is
actively hunting down Black Hat SEO practices,
some might slip through for a while. This means
that Negative SEO attempts wont guarantee a
penalty from Google for the victim. Not only
that, it might even do the opposite and
actuallyhelp the target to rank
better! Similarly, hacking attempts are not that
hard to avoid as long as you are using a robust
system securing your site (make sure they are
updated). Also avoid using simple administrator
passwords just because you think nobody is
interested in ruining your humble site. You know
what they say better safe than sorry. In
general, Negative SEO can be costly, takes a lot
of effort and is highly risky. The return on the
other hand, isnt even guaranteed and while it
might work, its quite easy to fix once the
target realize what is happening. In short
Negative SEO is a high risk, low reward activity.
Unless theres a very compelling reason (revenge
maybe?), it is quite unlikely for anyone to
attempt on doing it. The most likely websites to
be targeted for SEO are those in
highly-competitive, high- money fields
gambling sites are a common example of this.
Sites that are in calmer niches are far less
likely to be hit by negative SEO indeed,
anything that happens is more
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likely to be an accident or a remnant of an old
advertising strategy instead of a deliberate
attack on you. That doesnt mean you should be
complacent, though. Constant vigilance is the
best way to protect your site and your
reputation, so lets look at what you can do to
help protect your site. How To Defend Against
Negative SEO Detection The first step in
defending your website is to detect any signs of
attack such as a sudden drop in organic traffic.
This is easy to notice if you are constantly
monitoring your traffic through Google Analytics.
You can also set up Google Webmaster Tools Email
Alert. This will allow Google to notify you
through email if your website is not indexed or
receive a manual penalty. If you havent done
anything wrong, that can mean that your website
is under attack. The sooner you know, the faster
you can react and minimize the damage. Disavowing
Googles answer to Negative SEO is the Disavow
tool. You can see the full process here what
it comes down to, though, is basically saying I
dont like or trust that link, please dont
factor it into my rankings. By disavowing low
quality links, you avoid associating your
website with them so that your ranking and
reputation is protected.
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• Utilizing the Disavow tool also tells Google that
  you care about the quality of links pointing to
  your site. This will be taken into consideration
  when Googles Webspam Team is considering
  whether to penalize your site when they detect an
  influx of bad links pointing to it.
• The Disavow tool is very useful against
• Link Farms
• Google Bowling
• Securing Your Administrator Login

Hackers generally require some sort of
administrator access in order to mess around with
your site, and by adding additional levels of
security, you can drastically reduce the odds
that theyll be able to break in and start
disrupting what youre doing.
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• This will help you stop
• Altered SEO properties
• Changes to important files
• Modified redirects
• Revising SEO Settings
• This isnt tied to a particular problem, but you
  should regularly revise your SEO properties.This
  includes checking out your robot.txt once in a
  while or performing random checks on your
  contents internal coding (headers, image alt tag
  etc).

If you are using SEOPressor, checking SEO
properties will be much easier as each contents
will have its SEOPressor score. If you regularly
optimize your contents SEO properties to get
high SEOPressor score, then you can easily spot
the ones with bad score and fix them. It is
always better to be active and aggressive in
searching for attacks on your site, rather than
locking it up and expecting that nobody will be
able to get in. Final Thoughts Make no mistake
negative SEO attacks are a real threat, theyre
just not a common one. And even though you can
disavow links or report them to Google, it might
take some time
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before Google can conclude that you are innocent
and not the one whos behind the Black Hat
practices. Its better to be safe than sorry. Now
that you know what is negative SEO, set aside
some time every now and then to check for
negative SEO, and if need be, resolve it using
whichever technique is most appropriate. It is
also a good idea to just be nice to others and
avoid giving anyone any reason to attack you in
the first place. After all, being nice is free.