Negative SEO is something no business wants to have to deal with. It’s not fun, it hurts your site in the search engines, and it can be time-consuming to clean up. However, as the web continues to grow negative SEO is becoming more and more prevalent. Many sites that haven’t done anything wrong are now taking a hit. This even includes Kinsta! Today we’re going to show you how we cleaned up an attack on our site along with how to submit a disavow file.
It is always good to periodically check and keep an canada email list eye on your backlink profile, otherwise you may end up with a manual action from Google against your site. And then you will really go into panic mode! When it comes to negative SEO, it cannot always be avoided, so it is advisable to use the great tools to know when you need to take action.
What Is Negative SEO?
Kissmetrics defines negative SEO as the practice of using black hat and unethical techniques to sabotage a competitor’s search engine rankings. However, it’s important to understand that negative SEO isn’t always intentional. Today there are link farms, private blog networks, thousands of bot sites, and all sorts of other link generating things. And sometimes, unfortunately, your site can simply get mixed up with someone else’s.
If we look at the last 24 months on Google Trends we can see that “negative SEO” appears to be on the rise. This isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so it’s important Negative SEO to understand why it’s happening and how to protect your website.
There are all kinds of different forms of negative SEO. Here are some examples:
- Spam link building against your domain
- Generate negative comments to find out more about reasonable adjustments influence ratings in SERPs
- Creating false social signals or profiles
- Link Lists and Private Blog Networks (PBNs)
- Scrape and redistribute your content
- Getting your site de-indexed (e.g. hacking your robots.txt file)
And probably one of the worst kinds is someone
hacking your site and injecting it with burkina faso business directory thousands of Viagra and pharmaceutical terms. Below is what a marketer woke up to one morning. This is also known as on-site negative SEO. It is important to realize that is not just off-site. If Google sees a list of links (link farms) coming from your IP or site, you can be penalized as well.
Negative SEO is also a lot more public than it used to be. Once upon a time it was simply something that internet marketers talked about amongst themselves. But now you can even go to popular sites like Fiverr, search for “,” and a ton of jobs appear (as shown below) on how to perform negative SEO against your competitors. Or you can easily search black hat forums and hire someone to start building bad links against anyone you choose.
