What is SEO? It’s how we optimize our websites to ensure that they are search engine friendly and rank well in the search result for our keywords. But for some keywords, it’s very competitive. In fact, it can be so competitive that it’s downright nasty: that’s where we have to deal with negative SEO, when a competitor will try to do bad things to their competitors’ websites in an effort to get their competitors to rank below them. This can include creating content that’s negative, posting negative fake reviews about your business, or creating links. Here’s an even better explanation, dealing with negative SEO:
Dealing with Negative SEO
Then there’s the whole issue surrounding Negative SEO. That’s when competitors of yours will resort to anything they can possibly do to get your website to rank below theirs in the search results. They will do things like create lots of bad, low quality, inappropriate links to your website. They think that by creating links to your website (bad links), your website will go down in the search engine results. Or, might even get banned in the search engines for having bad, low quality links. We’ve been victims of negative SEO campaigns in the past, to this website. We know what it’s like.
Hire an SEO Expert to Remove Negative SEO
Companies and individuals hire us (and Bill Hartzer) to help clean up negative SEO attacks on their websites. It can be frustrating and time consuming, especially if the links keep coming, over and over again, week after week. The process of dealing with Negative SEO involves identifying all of the links and then disavowing them with Google and even reaching out to webmasters and website owners to get the links removed. Do you have time to do that? Most likely not.
Your time is better spent running your business.
What Negative SEO Looks Like Today
Negative SEO (search engine optimization) is any deliberate attempt by a third party to harm a website’s search rankings. The classic version is a flood of spammy links: thousands of links from hacked sites, link farms and foreign-language directories, often with anchor text for pharmaceuticals, gambling or adult content, pointed at a site that had nothing to do with any of it. That still happens. But negative SEO has broadened. I now see scraped copies of a site published on other domains to create duplicate content, fake reviews posted to Google Business Profiles, fraudulent DMCA takedown notices filed to get pages removed from Google’s index, hacked sites injected with hidden links and redirects, and competitors buying brand-name keywords in Google Ads to divert searchers.
Google’s position is that its systems ignore most spam links automatically, and for large sites with strong link profiles that is largely true. For smaller sites, a sudden spike of toxic links can still coincide with a ranking drop, and a hacked site with injected content will lose rankings regardless of who did it. The first job is always to determine whether the attack actually caused the loss, because treating a core algorithm update as a negative SEO attack wastes months on the wrong fix.
How I Diagnose a Suspected Attack
Diagnosis starts with dates. I line up the ranking and traffic drop in Google Search Console against the backlink timeline from Majestic and Semrush, Google’s published algorithm update dates, and the site’s own change history. If new links from hundreds of unrelated domains appeared in the weeks before the drop, that supports an attack. If the links appeared after the drop, or the drop coincides with a core update that affected competitors too, the links are not the cause. I also crawl the site for injected content, check for unauthorized redirects, review the Google Business Profile for review manipulation, and search for scraped copies of the site’s pages.
Cleanup and Recovery
When links are the problem, the response is a disavow file submitted through Google Search Console, built from a complete export of the site’s backlinks and filtered to the domains and patterns that are clearly manipulative. I disavow at the domain level, keep the file as the permanent record of what was excluded, and update it as new links arrive. Where a hack is involved, the cleanup is security work first: removing the injected code, closing the vulnerability, and then requesting a review if Google applied a manual action. For scraped content, DMCA complaints to Google and the hosting provider remove the copies. For fake reviews, the process runs through Google’s reporting tools and, in persistent cases, through documentation that supports a legal demand.
Preventing the Next One
Most negative SEO is opportunistic, and sites that monitor their link profile, lock down their CMS, and keep their Google Business Profile verified are harder targets. I set up ongoing monitoring of new backlinks, Search Console alerts, and periodic security scans as part of the engagement so that the next attempt is caught in days rather than months. When an attack is severe enough to involve litigation, the same evidence that drives the cleanup supports the case; I have served as an expert witness on negative SEO claims where the question was who was responsible and what it cost.