The Perils of NSEO and How It Can Be Solved

Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to getting known on the World Wide Web. There are literally hundreds of techniques individuals and business entities can take to improve their search engine results for related phrases, long-tail keywords, numerals, individual characters, acronyms, and individual words.

However, people can undoubtedly harm their ranking on Google and other worldwide - and not-so-frequently-heard-of alternatives - search engines. Engaging in such activity, whether intentional or not, is coined NSEO, or negative search engine optimization.

A Short Case Study Of NSEO

A site titled with the URL streamsports.io was recently fourth in the world on Google's listings for "stream sports," and first globally for "streamsports."

Recently, a site by the name of clarimind.com overtook streamsports.io for the top spot on Google for the search term "streamsports.io."

301 Redirect Worked In Opposition To Streamsports.io's Ranking

The site experiencing negative search results - streamsports.io - searched online and found that hundreds of web pages existed with 301 redirects to that particular URL. A vast majority of those sites were considered low-quality, spam-ridden pages, including ottqrxivzzol.com, haoai345.com, and jodietstest100131.com.

It seems as if a competitor 301 redirected the URL in question to hundreds of these junk web pages.

Attempting Canonicalization To Boost Search Engine Performance

The website owner tried to add the phrase "rel='canonical'" to his web domain, streamsports.io.

However, the attempt didn't work in favor of the web page. Next, the owner decided to redirect all such traffic to the competing site, cloudflare.com, reporting that all such sites were attacking the owner's legitimate, under-attack website.

Immediately after this action, all junk websites attacking streamsports.io were rendered useless in the NSEO efforts towards the web page.

The Competitor's Staunch Efforts Persisted

The following day, the attacking websites all moved to domains directly related to general streaming, although none were involved in sports, rather being related to movies and television programs.

The Solution

An effective solution to this problem is far from easy, although building a powerful site in terms of page ranking, authority, and other valued SEO variables work well.

NSEO attacks can tank particular URLs, but fail to crash entire domains. As such, building a strong domain, rather than specific URL, is the most effective strategy in this situation.