There are many things that can be said about negative SEO, but negative SEO itself isn’t a negative thing. It’s actually a very helpful service for those who do not wish to allow their online reputation to be determined by others. Negative SEO involves using some alternative SEO methods and strategies in order to place your content at the top of search engines’ results pages — which would result in your competitor’s site traffic going down and yours going up, naturally.
What negative SEO is NOT:
If you hear negative talk regarding negative SEO such as “negative SEO means destroying your competitor’s website” or that negative SEO services include malware distribution or permanent blacklisting then you should know that this is just FUD.
In negative SEO attacks, links from multiple posts are created from questionable website sources. This negative connection is then used to spam a website’s rankings in search engines. For example, if a negative post against a brand is created on the New York Times site, that company can pay for links from untrustworthy sites in an an effort to hurt the post’s chances for ranking for the brand’s name. The negative SEO attack will cause the New York Times article to become less visible when a potential customer or client types the brand name into a search engine.
Don’t let negative SEO ruin your business
The best way to defend against negative SEO attacks is by monitoring negative content and understand how this could affect your company’s online reputation and increasing your digital marketing budget to counteract these negative sources. If you aren’t careful, your site could be sandboxed due to a Google penalty.
If we examine all of the SEO-related activities that are connected with negative SEO, we’ll notice that producing spammy (toxic) backlinks, duplicating content, and offering phony evaluations have an actual impact on search engine optimization.
It’s possible that Google will find a flaw in your site due to negative SEO services. The best you can do as a business owner is to stay up to speed on the many methods that lead to site penalties. Remain vigilant, and employ the most recent technologies to defend yourself against negative SEO services.