19 Common Negative SEO Tactics: Attack and Defence

There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others (Niccolo Machiavelli)

Don’t try this at home kids. I don’t advocate the use of hostile SEO under any circumstances. And I’m not about to reveal anything really dangerous or secret here.

But it is important for brands to understand the nature of SEO warfare – because it’s a real threat that is out there. You need to know your enemy and know your weaknesses. If you’re smart, you’ll hire a good SEO agency to watch your back out there.

In order to help SEO warriors prepare for battle I prepared this list of six hostile SEO tactics that the bad guys are using out there right now. I’ll also look at six things you can do to defend yourself if you’re attacked.

Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster (Sun Tzu)

What Is Negative SEO?

A negative SEO attack refers to malicious practices aimed at harming a website’s search engine rankings. It’s essentially the opposite of traditional SEO, where efforts focus on improving rankings. Negative SEO tactics are typically employed by unethical competitors or individuals looking to sabotage a site’s performance on search engines like Google.

A business might engage in negative SEO to gain an unfair competitive advantage by sabotaging a competitor’s search engine rankings. While unethical and risky, some businesses believe that harming their competition can indirectly boost their own success.

Here are the main reasons a business might resort to negative SEO:

1. Reducing competitor visibility: By lowering a competitor’s rankings, the business aims to occupy higher positions in search engine results, capturing more organic traffic and sales.
2. Financial gain: Businesses in industries with high competition or lucrative keywords may see negative SEO as a cost-effective way to gain an edge rather than investing in legitimate SEO.
3. Revenge or vendetta: A disgruntled competitor or individual might employ negative SEO as retaliation for perceived slights, business losses, or disputes.
4. Desperation: Businesses struggling to compete may turn to negative SEO as a last-ditch effort to remain relevant or survive in their industry.
5. Lack of ethics: Some businesses, driven by greed or a “win-at-all-costs” mentality, may see no issue in adopting black-hat tactics, including negative SEO.
6. Short-term gains: Negative SEO can offer quick results in undermining a competitor, which may be appealing to businesses focused on immediate wins rather than sustainable growth.
7. Sabotaging brand reputation: Targeting a competitor’s reputation with fake reviews or harmful content can reduce consumer trust, redirecting potential customers to the attacker’s business.

11 Types of Negative SEO Attacks

1. Anchor text over-optimisation

Google tries to automatically detect unnatural linking activity and either ignore it or penalise it. A common hostile link-building tactic is building links to the target site with gross anchor-text over-optimisation for keywords the site ranks well for. In some cases Google may penalise the site and demote their rankings.

2. Spammy anchor text

Another common tactic is to try to make the target site look spammy by building lots of links to it using anchor text related to spammy topics – such as gambling or adult industries. This makes the website look suspicious to search engines and can significantly harm the site’s credibility and rankings.

3. Penalty links

Links from sites that have a Google penalty can be very harmful. Often these are established sites that suspiciously show no toolbar PageRank. Another warning sign is a site that fails to rank for obvious queries like its name. A closer look at their link profile usually reveals why the site may be penalised by Google. The worst offending sites may have been removed from Google’s index altogether. These sites won’t appear no matter what you search for.

4. Doorway sites

Even a very small number of links from certain types of doorway sites can be enough to adversely affect rankings – because it looks like those sites have been set up just to manipulate Google. And who else but the site owner would go to all the trouble of setting up another website for that? Only the site owner. Right?

5. Bad or Negative reviews

This is a common black hat SEO technique. Complaints about a business appearing online can be harmful to that business. A lot of serious complaints appearing in search results when people search for your brand name can be disastrous. Managing your reputation in the face of negative search results can be very difficult and is best left to the experts. Hire a good SEO agency with a senior Head of SEO. Don’t rely on your in-house SEO unless they have many years of SEO experience.

6. Bad outbound links.

This kind of attack is still relatively rare, but it appears to be on the rise and it can have devastating effects that last a few months. Linking out from your website to sites that Google regards as suspicious is a very bad idea. You may not intentionally do that but other people might.

Fortunately, most sites are automatically protected against the most common forms of outbound link attack by the “nofollow” microformat which tells Google to ignore that link for SEO purposes. But there are still ways in which people can place bad links on your site, especially if you have a blog or a forum. A more rare – but very serious scenario – is for hackers to break into your site in order to build links. Usually, this is not an attempt to harm your rankings – but it almost certainly will do. The hackers’ aim is usually to hijack your site to build links to support their own SEO campaigns – usually short-term campaigns targeting disposable temporary sites. Unfortunately, hackers often link to undesirable sites such as gambling and adult sites which make your site look suspicious to Google.

Eventually, the suspicious linking activity yields Google Penalties for the target sites. If you have not noticed the bad links by this stage then you’re probably now linking out to multiple sites with Google penalties, using spammy anchor text. That’s seriously bad for your own SEO. Fortunately, once the problem is discovered, your bad outbound links can usually be cleaned up quite easily. But in some cases you may need to submit a reconsideration request in Google Webmaster Tools. Just be honest and explain what happened. It may take several weeks for your rankings to recover.

7. Content scraping

Scraping involves copying original content from a website and republishing it across multiple low-quality domains. This creates duplicate content issues, which can confuse search engines about which version is the original. In some cases, the scraped versions may rank higher than the original, leading to a loss of traffic for the victim.

8. Hacking and malware

Hacking is a more aggressive form of negative SEO. An attacker might compromise a site to insert malicious code, spammy links, or harmful redirects. Sometimes, hackers modify critical SEO elements like meta tags or canonical tags to damage rankings. Once search engines detect malware, they may flag the site as unsafe, driving away visitors.

9. Manipulating CTR (Click-Through Rate)

This tactic involves using bots to manipulate user behaviour signals. For example, bots might repeatedly click on the target site in search results and then leave immediately. This increases the bounce rate and makes the site look irrelevant, which can lead to a drop in rankings.

10. Negative social signals

Spreading false information about a business on social media can also harm SEO. Fake news, harmful posts, or accusations can go viral, damaging brand perception. While social signals aren’t a direct ranking factor, a tarnished reputation can lead to reduced traffic and engagement, indirectly affecting rankings.

11. Deindexing attacks

A more advanced tactic involves trying to get a competitor’s site deindexed. This might involve altering robots.txt files, adding “noindex” tags, or reporting the site as spam to search engines. If successful, the site disappears from search results entirely, devastating its organic traffic.

6 SEO Defence Tips

SEO warfare is serious: it’s best left to the professionals. You need the protection of a really good SEO agency that understands the terrain of the battlefield. Think of them as your Special Forces escort. But there are some basic things that you can do to reduce the risk to your business too.

1. Google Alerts.

Set up alerts for your brand name and your domain name (without www.) Make sure you select “All results”. By setting up alerts, you’ll be notified of any negative campaigns or false information being spread about your business. Early detection allows you to act quickly and address the issue before it escalates. Once a week should suffice for you to scan the weekly email alert to look for link problems like the ones described above.

2. Check your inbound links.

Keeping a close eye on your backlink profile is essential to spot any toxic links that could harm your rankings. Tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, or SEMrush can help you identify suspicious links. You can’t ask them to remove the link in these cases so you have to try something else. If you find any, you can disavow them using Google’s Disavow Tool to prevent penalties.

Don’t have those tools? Put in your diary to check Moz Link Explorer for suspicious links to your website. Plus, Bing Webmaster already lets you disavow links. From the dashboard, choose “Configure My Site”, then “Disavow Links”. It surprises me that people often fail to notice even severe outbound link problem attacks until it impacts rankings and traffic.

3. Watch PageRank.

As an SEO metric, it’s outdated and lacks granularity. But as a warning sign, it can be useful. Most importantly, don’t build links from websites without checking PageRank for the homepage. Look out for a significant drop in the PageRank score of your own homepage. This could be caused by other factors, such as the natural loss of an important link. But it represents sufficient grounds for further investigation.

4. Watch traffic.

Unusual traffic patterns, such as sudden spikes in traffic followed by high bounce rates, can indicate bot attacks or click-through rate manipulation. Regularly analyse your site’s performance data in tools like GA4 to spot and address these anomalies early.

In particular, look out for a significant drop in traffic from non-brand keywords. Set up Custom Alerts in GA4 to warn you of any potentially sinister changes in activity on your site.

5. Good SEO.

A healthy SEO campaign – steadily building legitimate links – could help protect your site from the effects of a small hostile SEO campaign because one of the things Google is likely to be looking for is the percentage of links that are bad. If you already have 50,000 normal, healthy links built up over several years, and somebody builds a few hundred bad ones, that’s not likely to have a significant impact because the percentage of bad links is small.

6. Security.

Strong cybersecurity is crucial to protect against hacking or malware attacks. Implement secure protocols like HTTPS, use strong passwords, and regularly update your CMS, plugins, and themes. Adding firewalls and enabling two-factor authentication can also significantly reduce the risk of being targeted.

To ensure comprehensive protection, consider working with pen testing companies to identify and address vulnerabilities in your systems. These experts can simulate real-world cyberattacks to evaluate your website’s defenses and recommend actionable improvements.

Make sure your FTP and CMS passwords are secure. The most secure passwords contain a lot of characters and contain a mixture of random capital and lowercase letters, as well as numbers and symbols. Not real words. Make sure you have the most up to date WordPress patches installed. Block your CMS login pages to robots so hackers can’t find it in search results. It’s quite easy for hackers to use Google to find admin login pages to attack. If you’re updating your website and there is a temporary site, make sure it’s blocked to robots and check that the password is a good one.

If you have a brochure site and a blog, or an e-commerce site and a blog, you may have two CMS systems. Check with your technical people and secure them both.

7. Audit content frequently

Regularly check your website for duplicate content to ensure no one has copied and redistributed your original work. If you find your content being misused, you can file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown request to have it removed.

8. Track reviews

Fake reviews can damage your reputation and hurt local SEO rankings. Keep an eye on review platforms like Google, Yelp, and Trustpilot. When you spot fake reviews, respond professionally to mitigate the damage and report them to the platform for removal.

Conclusion

Article by

Rodrigo Lasanta

Rodrigo Lasanta is the Lead SEO Specialist at Digivate, with over 7 years' experience growing B2B and e-commerce brands across a range of different industries. He holds a Master's Degree in Digital Media with a special focus on Digital Marketing. In his free time, you can find him listening to SEO podcasts, reading books and comics, and watching the weirdest films you can imagine.