Neg­a­tive SEO (some­times called “Google Bowl­ing”) refers to all actions some­one might do to hurt their com­peti­tor’s search rank­ings. Neg­a­tive SEO con­sists of mali­cious tech­niques, whose intent is the exact oppo­site of nat­ur­al search engine opti­miza­tion, i.e. decreas­ing vis­i­bil­i­ty or even dein­dex­ing the web­site, and pre­vent­ing it from show­ing in search engine results.

Examples of negative SEO

There are a num­ber of tech­niques used to dam­age your hard-deserved rank­ing on SERP. Below are some of the most pop­u­lar actions you should keep your eye on.

Hacker attacks

A hack­er attack can take your web­site down entire­ly, from which you can recov­er with a fresh back­up of the web­site. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, they can go unno­ticed and cause sig­nif­i­cant harm. One exam­ple is in chang­ing your robots.txt file and telling search engine bots not to crawl your website.

Poor quality, spammy links

Build­ing spam­my links, which point to a com­peti­tor’s web­site, is one of the most com­mon neg­a­tive SEO tech­niques. Usu­al­ly, it’s tens of thou­sands of links from pages with sus­pi­cious content.

Duplicate content

Cre­at­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing dupli­cat­ed con­tent of a web­site is also con­sid­ered neg­a­tive SEO, since it can hurt your rankings.

Fake social media profiles

This black hat SEO tech­nique includes cre­at­ing fake social media accounts, and post­ing in your com­pa­ny’s name. As soon as you learn of a fake account, you should report them as spam in order to have them removed.

How to fight negative SEO

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Google does­n’t real­ly acknowl­edge neg­a­tive SEO as a prac­tice that hap­pens very fre­quent­ly. How­ev­er, in 2012 they released a tool called Dis­avow File that can help you fight neg­a­tive SEO.

Here are some sug­ges­tions with which you can min­i­mize the effect of neg­a­tive SEO.

Build trust/Play by the rules

Fol­low Google’s rules and Web­mas­ter Guide­lines to build trust and help Google find and under­stand your con­tent. Don’t build unnat­ur­al links; for­get about link­ing to penal­ized web­sites, as well as buy­ing and sell­ing links.

Backlink profile

The most com­mon neg­a­tive SEO tech­nique is build­ing low-qual­i­ty or even hurt­ful links. You can use dif­fer­ent tools for mon­i­tor­ing links, as well as the Links to your Web­site report in the Google Search Console.

If you keep mon­i­tor­ing your back­link pro­file on a reg­u­lar basis, you’ll be able to dis­avow these links before they can cause severe dam­age to your web­site’s rank­ings. It’s rec­om­mend­ed to check your back­links pro­file once a week, or at least once a month.

When you review your back­links pro­file, keep an eye on large num­bers of new links, as well as anchor texts that look suspicious.

Google Search Console Email Alerts

If you haven’t already, set up your Google Search Con­sole account. After set­ting up the account, click on the gear but­ton and enable Search Con­sole email noti­fi­ca­tions. This way, you’ll get noti­fied if there are seri­ous issues with index­ing or penal­ties from Google.

Disavow File

Dis­avow File should be the last resort in fight­ing neg­a­tive SEO. If you notice back­links you don’t want to be asso­ci­at­ed with your web­site, the first step is to con­tact web­mas­ters and ask if they can take the links down.

If you are unsuc­cess­ful in remov­ing the mali­cious links, you can use Google or Bing’s Dis­avow Tools, and ask search engines direct­ly to dis­re­gard all the spam­my back­links when access­ing your website.

Other actions

Keep an eye on your web­site’s secu­ri­ty and over­all SEO health. Secure your web­site from hack­er attacks with strong pass­words and back­ups of all files and data­base. Check for dupli­cate con­tent, mon­i­tor your web­site speed and social media mentions.

If you take these actions on a reg­u­lar basis, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of neg­a­tive SEO influ­ence will dras­ti­cal­ly decrease, and even if it hap­pens, you’ll be able to pre­vent seri­ous consequences.