We all know that ever since the release of Penguin Algorithm Update, Google deals harsh penalties for websites that use black hat SEO techniques, so here’s an idea to keep you up at night: What if a malicious party (say, your closest competitor) starts using those techniques on your site just to try and get you penalized?

1. How To Do Negative SEO Attack
We all know that ever since the release of Penguin Algorithm Update, Google deals harsh
penalties for websites that use black hat SEO techniques, so here’s an idea to keep you up at
night:
What if a malicious party (say, your closest competitor) starts using those techniques
on your site just to try and get you penalized?
This, ladies and gentlemen, is something that is commonly known as Negative SEO.
Top of Form:-
What Is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO is the act of using Black Hat SEO on other websites in order to get them
penalized by Google. Negative SEO can also include reducing the effectiveness of a
website’s SEO properties by disabling or altering them.

2. Dealing with Negative SEO tactics can be quite tricky since some of them is out of your
control, like pointing bad links (a.k.a link bomb) to your site. Another thing is, they are also
a bit hard to detect.
Unlike some hacking practices that aims to deface or simply take down a website,
a Negative SEO attack doesn’t affect a website’s look and feel.
Instead, the effects are only apparent once your website takes a dip in search ranking and
incoming traffic.
But Why Would Anyone Commit A Negative SEO Attack?
Similar to hackers, people who do Negative SEO attacks might do it for various reasons. It
can be intentional, such as sabotaging a competitor’s website, extortion or simply for
fun.
And believe it or not, an unintentional Negative SEO attack can also happen. There are
cases where family members, employees or even hired SEO agencies deliberately do
obsolete Black Hat practices on behalf of the owner thinking it will help their website
ranking.
Types Of Negative SEO Attack
Just like normal SEO, Negative SEO also have both on-page as well off-page aspect to it:
Negative Off-Page SEO
As the name implies, Negative Off-Page SEO attacks without internally changing your
website. Mostly it revolves around using Black Hat or negative SEO link building practices
and point them to the target website:

3. Link farms are a series of web pages created for the sole purpose of linking to another
page on the web.
Ordinarily, inbound links are a good thing that help to improve your site’s ranking… but if
you have a lot of links coming in from same unrelated, spammy websites, it tells Google that
you are trying to artificially increase the number of links pointing to your page by creating
link farms and you will get penalized.
In a Negative SEO attack, malicious parties will create obvious link farms and heavily
link to the target website.
Sometimes they will also purchase link farm services or buy site-wide ads to achieve the
same effect. Since it’s hard for Google to tell who’s responsible for the links, it can lead to a
Google penalty on the target site when detected.
Copyright complaints are a bit more complex, but at their core, they usually involve a
someone claiming that you’ve posted material that belongs to them.
In many cases, this can result in an automatic removal of the page for up to 10 days– and
wouldn’t it be just awful if your landing pages vanished right in the middle of your biggest
campaigns?

4. Finally, competitors can falsify duplicate content – basically just copying and pasting your
web pages over and over, maybe even as part of those link farms we discussed above.
An influx of duplicated contents across domains might signal a manipulation attempt to get
multiple different websites ranking with the same content. This used to be a popular Black
Hat SEO technique before Google started cracking down on it.
As you can see, there are many different ways for negative SEO techniques to be done to
your website… but no matter how tempting they might be, you should never even consider
doing any of these yourself.
Even if it works in the short-term, it’s not going to be effective forever… and could land you
in serious legal trouble if anyone can prove you were behind it.
Negative On-Page SEO
This form of attack is a little different, and generally focuses on hacking into your site and
changing things around. With as little as a few minutes to start messing with your setup, a
hacker could easily disrupt your site’s coding, introduce viruses, and generally wreak havoc
on everything you’ve tried to build.
The real threats are the ones that are hard to see, though, and consist of the following:
Negatively altering your SEO properties: Let’s be honest – are you really that likely to
notice if someone changes all the alt text on your pictures to be less effective? A lot of basic
SEO techniques are intended to be “set and forget”, and that’s what can leave you
vulnerable to on-page negative SEO strategies.
Changing the Robots.txt: This is easily one of the most important files on your site when it
comes to SEO because it tells crawlers how to interact with your site. It is normally used to

5. tell Google which part you don’t want them to crawl and index such as a live but unfinished
page. An attacker with access to your site can easily modify the robot.txt to tell Google to
ignore important pages or even the whole website.
Modifying Redirects: Search engines have an opinion on certain error pages – namely,
they’re bad. Sites that automatically redirect from bad pages generally aren’t penalized too
much, but if your redirects are changed, disabled, or scrambled, you could find yourself
plummeting down the ratings.
The good news, as we’ll discuss later, is that on-page negative SEO attacks are much harder
to perform… and much easier for a competent programming team to fix, too.
The Likelihood of Negative SEO Attacks

6. With all the stuff we’ve talked about here, you might be worried that there’s a rampant
amount of negative SEO going on and you just haven’t caught up to it yet.
Well… not exactly.
Google is quite good at detecting when negative SEO is occurring. For example, if
someone’s trying to do some Google Bowling and smash you over with site-wide links,
there’s a good chance that the link from that site will only be counted as one vote from
them – unlikely to do you any real harm.
Also, remember that while Google is actively hunting down Black Hat SEO practices, some
might slip through for a while. This means that Negative SEO attempts won’t guarantee a
penalty from Google for the victim. Not only that, it might even do the opposite
and actuallyhelp the target to rank better!
Similarly, hacking attempts are not that hard to avoid as long as you are using a robust
system securing your site (make sure they are updated). Also avoid using simple
administrator passwords just because you think nobody is interested in ruining your
humble site. You know what they say – better safe than sorry.
In general, Negative SEO can be costly, takes a lot of effort and is highly risky. The return on
the other hand, isn’t even guaranteed and while it might work, it’s quite easy to fix once the
target realize what is happening.
In short – Negative SEO is a high risk, low reward activity. Unless there’s a very
compelling reason (revenge maybe?), it is quite unlikely for anyone to attempt on doing it.
The most likely websites to be targeted for SEO are those in highly-competitive, high-
money fields – gambling sites are a common example of this. Sites that are in calmer
niches are far less likely to be hit by negative SEO – indeed, anything that happens is more

7. likely to be an accident or a remnant of an old advertising strategy instead of a deliberate
attack on you.
That doesn’t mean you should be complacent, though. Constant vigilance is the best way to
protect your site and your reputation, so let’s look at what you can do to help protect your
site.
How To Defend Against Negative SEO
Detection
The first step in defending your website is to detect any signs of attack such as a sudden
drop in organic traffic. This is easy to notice if you are constantly monitoring your traffic
through Google Analytics.
You can also set up Google Webmaster Tools Email Alert. This will allow Google to notify
you through email if your website is not indexed or receive a manual penalty.
If you haven’t done anything wrong, that can mean that your website is under attack. The
sooner you know, the faster you can react and minimize the damage.
Disavowing
Google’s answer to Negative SEO is the Disavow tool. You can see the full process here –
what it comes down to, though, is basically saying “I don’t like or trust that link, please
don’t factor it into my rankings”. By disavowing low quality links, you avoid associating
your website with them so that your ranking and reputation is protected.

8. Utilizing the Disavow tool also tells Google that you care about the quality of links
pointing to your site. This will be taken into consideration when Google’s Webspam Team
is considering whether to penalize your site when they detect an influx of bad links
pointing to it.
The Disavow tool is very useful against :
 Link Farms
 Google Bowling
Securing Your Administrator Login
Hackers generally require some sort of administrator access in order to mess around with
your site, and by adding additional levels of security, you can drastically reduce the odds
that they’ll be able to break in and start disrupting what you’re doing.

9. This will help you stop:
 Altered SEO properties
 Changes to important files
 Modified redirects
Revising SEO Settings
This isn’t tied to a particular problem, but you should regularly revise your SEO
properties.This includes checking out your robot.txt once in a while or performing
random checks on your contents’ internal coding (headers, image alt tag etc).
If you are using SEOPressor, checking SEO properties will be much easier as each
contents will have it’s SEOPressor score. If you regularly optimize your contents’ SEO
properties to get high SEOPressor score, then you can easily spot the ones with bad score
and fix them.
It is always better to be active and aggressive in searching for attacks on your site, rather
than locking it up and expecting that nobody will be able to get in.
Final Thoughts
Make no mistake – negative SEO attacks are a real threat, they’re just not a common one.
And even though you can disavow links or report them to Google, it might take some time

10. before Google can conclude that you are innocent and not the one who’s behind the Black
Hat practices.
It’s better to be safe than sorry. Now that you know what is negative SEO, set aside some
time every now and then to check for negative SEO, and if need be, resolve it using
whichever technique is most appropriate. It is also a good idea to just be nice to
others and avoid giving anyone any reason to attack you in the first place. After all, being
nice is free.