What is a Negative SEO Attack?

A Negative SEO attack is a more targeted and aggressive subset of a Negative SEO campaign. In this case, the attacker focuses on exploiting specific vulnerabilities in your website’s SEO profile to cause maximum damage. Common tactics include flooding your site with spammy backlinks from low-quality domains, using toxic anchor texts (like pharmaceutical or adult keywords), and even reporting the site to get your pages deindexed. Such attacks can have immediate and long-term consequences on your site’s search engine performance. To defend against this, website owners should routinely audit their backlinks, set up monitoring tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush, and proactively disavow suspicious links through Google Search Console.