What is Negative SEO and How Can it Hurt You

When your rankings tank for no reason; you're adding fresh new content and you have quality links, you may have a competitor who is using negative SEO to take your place in the SERPs. Negative SEO is someone performing activities to purposefully hurt your rankings.

Bad Links

The easiest way for a competitor to hurt your rankings is to submit your URL to link farms or spammy sites. You have to disavow the links, which may keep popping up. If the links are all coming from the same place, you can disavow the domain. SEO is on ongoing job; check your inbound links and the referring domains frequently to catch spammy links quickly.

Unusual links are not always from your competitor; there are sites that scrape the web to build their own directories. If you ever hired a shady SEO firm, they may have bought links from another firm; you need to disavow these links.

Duplicate Content

A desperate competitor may copy portions of your content and publish it elsewhere to make your content appear as if it is duplicate content. This does not always work; Google often knows which content it had indexed first, however, if it crawls the stolen content first, yours may not show in the SERPs.

Place quotes around several sentences in your content and search Google the exact sentences to find duplicate content. Google has a copyright infringement tool that you can use to report the offending website.

Other Negative SEO

A competitor could hack into your site and tell search engines not to crawl your website. Additionally, a person could place links to pornography or gambling website in the middle of your content to make it appear that you are selling link. Both instances are extremely rare as it would take less effort to use ethical SEO practices.