Negative SEO: How to Identify, Fix and Prevent an Attack

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

The search engine optimization industry has undergone a large-scale transition since Google first introduced the Penguin update in April 2012. This update targeted sites involved in building spam backlink profiles and made it much more difficult for SEOs to take advantage of perhaps less-than-white-hat link building techniques. Unfortunately, in attempting to stamp out one black hat SEO technique, Google opened the door to another: negative SEO.

Negative SEO: What is it?

Negative SEO, also known as Google Bowling, is using search engine algorithms against websites by mimicking spam behavior, making it look like they’re using black hat link building techniques to boost their rankings. When people talk about a "negative SEO attack," they usually mean creating a whole bunch (as in thousands) of low quality links pointed at a site. As a result, search engines hit the target with a link penalty, which can have some pretty drastic impacts on ranking and traffic. Basically, negative SEO is a frame job.

Negative SEO practices could take the form of a number of different tactics:

• Copying your content and scattering it around the web
• Creating public and private link networks pointing back to your page
• Building a profile of a large number of spammy or otherwise low quality links
• Generating fake social network profiles to attack your reputation online
• Linking to your site using anchor text like "Viagra," “poker online” or other suspicious keywords
• Trying to remove your most valuable backlinks

Google has waved their hands at the topic of negative SEO in the past, but there’s no doubt it’s real. A quick search online will find you countless horror stories of plunging search rankings. Black hat SEO forums are littered with threads by users who took down competitors with spam comments and penalized link networks. And a quick look at Google Trends will show you that "Google bowling" (red) and “negative SEO” (blue) continue to generate searches.

What’s more, if you search job boards like Fiverr, Freelancer or Upwork, you can find dozens of jobs looking for SEO help to fight a negative SEO attack.

Preventing Negative SEO

As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so we’ll start off by talking about how to prevent negative SEO. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can really do to stop someone from trying to attack your SEO. You can really only take steps to limit its damage. Your number one defense against negative SEO is to be good at regular SEO. If you’ve got a well-established site with lots of links, trust and authority, negative SEO attempts aren’t really going to have much of an effect on your site.

If you’ve got a younger niche site that hasn’t had the chance to build up a lot of those ranking factors, you could be vulnerable. Thankfully, there’s a way to keep negative SEO from being very successful: alerts and monitoring.

• You can use Google Search Console to set up email alerts concerning your site’s health. Enable email notifications in Search Console Preferences. It’s best to get alerts on all topics to catch any negative SEO attempts.
• Get notifications of new links. Ahrefs, which is a paid tool, has this feature. Change the status of email notifications to daily to make sure you catch malicious links as soon as they appear.
• WooRank’s Weekly Email Digest keeps you up to date on any changes in organic, referral and direct traffic. View daily traffic for the week to see if any large drops in traffic are merely fluctuations or signs of trouble. Track keyword search volume in SERP Checker to see if you’re being targeted with negative SEO for a particular keyword.
• Set up Google Alerts for your company, brands and/or products. We have previously suggested you do this to find new link building opportunities, but it’s also a great way to stay on top of fake negative reviews and fake profiles attacking you in forums and on social media.

Once you’ve been alerted to a new link or mention, scrutinize it closely. What domain is it coming from? Is it relevant? Does the linking site use keywords as anchor text?

How to Identify Negative SEO

Have You Been Penalized?

The first step is to see if you’ve actually been hit by a Google penalty. A lot of people see a drop in traffic and immediately assume they’ve been penalized, when in reality the culprit is much more benign:

• Check your robots.txt file: You might be blocking crawlers from accessing certain pages, or even your whole site. This is particularly common if you’ve recently redesigned your site or launched a new one.
• Look for robots meta tag: Some people add the noindex robots meta tag to keep search engines from crawling and indexing a page and a supplement to, or replacement for, a robots.txt. file.
• Page canonicalization: Check your rel="canonical” tags to make sure they are pointing to the right pages. A common canonical issue is pointing to every pages’ canonical tag to a single page (such as the homepage). This causes search engines to concentrate all your link juice and authority in a single place.
• Crawl Errors: Check for crawl errors on Google Search Console to find any other issues that might be blocking bots from indexing your pages.

Once you’ve verified that you don’t have any on page or technical problems, you can now look into the possibility that you’ve incurred a Google penalty. Check in Manual Actions in Search Traffic for messages.

If you don’t see any messages, dig into your analytics data. If there’s a sudden drop in traffic or visibility on a particular day, search for recently released Google updates. If the dates line up there’s a good chance you’ve incurred their wrath.

Is it Negative SEO or Just Bad SEO?

More often than not, link penalties are the result of a low quality link building campaign by previous marketers. If your site has been around long enough there’s a good chance previous SEO campaigns at one point in time used a technique that’s now considered black hat.

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by Sam Gooch via SitePoint