AN INTRODUCTION TO NEGATIVE SEO

Essentially, the goal of Negative SEO is to attack your search competitors by utilizing a set of practices that will drop them in their rankings and, ideally, earn them a penalty.

While Google created Panda and Penguin to crack down on spammy content and poor quality or purchased links, it accidentally provided the fuel for the black hat community who had previously made their living offering cheap link-building services and hundreds of low-quality article submissions to utilize their nefarious skill set to a much more diabolical end: Negative SEO. After all, since the black hat approach no longer helps to rank sites, why not use it to hurt other sites?

And even in this post-Penguin/Panda world, there are plenty of companies and individuals that, rather than try to compete in the content marketing arena, proffer their black hat services in the name of destroying the rankings of target sites.

Now that you understand what Negative SEO is, how do you protect yourself from it? First and foremost, you should be monitoring your link profile closely using a wide range of tools—that include Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz—to get a full picture of all of your incoming links. Compile all of these links into a single spreadsheet and compare with previous and future lists to identify new links acquired. Analyze these new links and determine if they are healthy—Are they relevant? Are keywords used in the anchor text?

Now, once you’ve gotten into the habit of carefully monitoring your link profile every couple of weeks, you can notice an attack shortly after it begins. So if you start seeing a bevy of unnatural links pointing to your site, now is the time to make use of the Disavow Tool, Google’s tool that allows webmasters to disavow a link, essentially disqualifying it from sending any negative link juice your way.

At the end of the day, protecting yourself against negative SEO is a matter of vigilance and good habits. If you keep your link profile in good order and under constant supervision, you will be in a good position to ward off a Negative SEO attack. And remember, just because you know how to do Negative SEO does not mean, in any way, that you should do it. It will only hurt your rankings and bring down the quality of your site. But by knowing about it, you can keep your site safe.