Negative SEO Campaigns: What You Should Know & How to Deal With Them

Imagine being a victim to a negative SEO attack by your competitor. Considering the anonymous nature of the internet, one can easily launch spam bots to tarnish your site's name. Since Google has a neutral view of what happens on the internet, it is also hard for something to be done about it.

Negative SEO is basically an attempt to make it appear that a webmaster is using spam techniques to game the system. Multiple methods may be attempted, but it is commonly done through bots spamming in blog comments. It is quite obvious that such practices are negative for one's website, so it is now more common as an attack method.

Can Negative SEO Really be Effective?

Obvious manipulative link building is punished by Google in various ways, including the chance of de-indexing. If the links are frequent, unnatural, and have patterns, then you can bet that Google will start to notice. With the Penguin algorithm in effect, patterns are even easier for Google to detect.

Negative SEO is rarely used in a positive manner and is done through sophisticated means. Google has outlined so many examples of negative SEO tactics that it is hard to go under the radar.

According to Google themselves, they have implemented measures within their bot that will pick up link spamming attacks in most cases. They claim that it is nearly impossible to take down a competitor's website through obvious means. With the disavow tools launched by Google, this allows webmaster to report unfair links that may affect their SEO.

If there is indeed a large-scale link attack on one's website, the webmaster must be diligent and swift with disavow reporting. If this is not effective, the user may report it in Google's webmaster forums so that engineers can make the algorithm better.

If links are through strange analytical or content scraping sites, Google can easily disregard them from affecting your SEO. Scraped directories also do not affect SEO in a negative way since Google had updated the algorithm. It is still safe to disavow links that you do not approve of.For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/8ag0yd/hugenegativeseoattackbylargecompetitor_what/.