Negative SEO is the exact opposite of normal SEO work. With negative SEO, you are not trying to increase your own rankings, but rather to harm other sites and thus cause their website to fall in Google’s.
Negative SEO is by no means a new phenomenon, but has (and probably will) always exist as long as search engines exist. In 2012, Google came out with their algorithm update Penguin, which actively penalized websites with low-quality or unnatural inbound links.
When the Penguin update was released, webmasters began creating low-quality links to competitors, so that Google would penalize the competitor and thus drop them in the organic results.
Examples of negative SEO
Both before and after the Penguin update, marketers and webmasters have been working with negative SEO. Including some of the most common examples of negative SEO.
Spam links / low-quality links
One of the most well-known strategies within negative SEO is the work of creating (typically automated) bad and unnatural links to your competitors. The Google Penguin update has been updated continuously, and as part of Google Hummingbird in 2013, Google no longer penalizes links in the same way, but instead devalues the value of incoming links without significant value. Therefore, it is not as easy today to harm your competitors in the search engines as it was in the past.
If you are hit by negative SEO in the form of countless bad and unnatural links, you can use Google’s own disavow tool. This tool tells Google that these links were created by others and they should not assign value to them (either positive or negative).
You need to be very careful when working with Google’s disavow tool. You can quickly devalue links that create value.
Is it illegal?
Negative SEO is not illegal in itself. Negative SEO can get in trouble, see Danish Marketing §3 “Businesses must demonstrate good marketing practices, taking into account consumers, businesses and general societal interests”. At the time of writing, there have been no cases judged in Danish courts for negative SEO in relation to link building.
If methods such as hacking are used, then it is definitely illegal. Not for the negative SEO part but the hacking part itself.
Are you affected by negative SEO?
There is usually always a solution if you are hit by negative SEO from one or more of your competitors. Whether it is link spam or direct hacking of your site.
Contact us at +45 71 96 93 10 or fill out our contact form here – We can help your business regain its rankings in Google.
