How to protect yourself against negative SEO

In any profession, there are well-meaning people and others who are less so. In SEO, it’s the same. While some experts work hard to try to rank a site using legitimate White Hat methods and put their minds to building THE most effective strategy, others strive to hinder the good rankings of their competitors through so-called Negative SEO or NSEO actions.

Here, the question is not so much about who will triumph, good or evil. Instead, we propose to take stock of what Negative SEO is, how to detect whether NSEO actions are being taken against you, and of course how to protect yourself from them to avoid disaster. Let’s get started!

Negative SEO or NSEO: what is it?

Negative SEO, which belongs to the Black Hat sphere (and is therefore just as reprehensible), consists of carrying out actions with the aim of deliberately harming a third-party site, for example by drawing a Google penalty to it or making its site inaccessible. Rather than working honestly on their SEO, these hackers prefer to focus their efforts on destroying the SEO of others. Generally, Negative SEO is directed against competing sites, but some hackers may also practice it simply as a “personal challenge” or out of a “taste for risk.”

It is important to distinguish a drop in a site’s organic traffic where mistakes have been made from that of a site that is the victim of malicious actions from an unidentified person. Unfortunately, Google lumps everyone into the same category and penalizes sites identically, whether they find themselves in one situation or the other.

Before going any further in this article, it seems important to us to clarify this practice: most of the time, Negative SEO is completely illegal, particularly when it is practiced against others with the intent to harm them.

This article in no way encourages the practice of such methods. The penalties faced by someone who practices NSEO are very severe.

Our goal here is to inform you about the ins and outs of Negative SEO so that you can protect yourself from it.

The different types of Negative SEO attacks

When it comes to harming their competitors, it’s clear that the most ill-intentioned SEOs are not lacking in imagination! Striking hard, anonymously, so that the competing site struggles to recover: that is the goal of the people who use and abuse NSEO against others.

While there is a whole slew of techniques that can be described as Negative SEO, we are going to focus our attention on the most common ones.

NSEO through content

The bane of organic search, duplicate content is highly damaging to your site and easily detectable. For a hacker looking to harm you, this technique is extremely easy to implement. Indeed, it requires no technical skills and is very inexpensive in terms of resources. The hacker simply grabs texts from third-party sites and injects them into your target site. To do this, hackers mainly use two methods, as simple as they are effective, especially on sites that include a discussion forum:

• a massive publication of duplicated content or content of poor quality through comments on different pages of your site;
• the creation of multiple member profile pages and the inclusion of duplicated content in the biography.

Otherwise, the hacker can simply break into your site through a security flaw in order to add duplicated or low-quality, or even completely illegal, content.

Another method used by some: stealing content as soon as it is published and injecting it onto a pirate site. So that the stolen content is indexed before the “real” content, the hacker makes sure that Google accesses their content first and indexes it before the original. Unfairly, the other site ends up penalized.

A major loophole exploited by many NSEO practitioners lies in indexing a large quantity of search pages.

Numerous page duplications within the same site can also be carried out by taking control of the HTACCESS file. The technique? Rewriting URLs endlessly…

Guaranteed results: after a few 100%-similar pieces of content, the Penguin algorithm will go into a panic and the Google penalty will quickly rear its head.

The creation of poor-quality netlinking

There are several Negative SEO techniques that can harm your netlinking. Tampering with one of the founding pillars of your SEO can very quickly tip your site over to the wrong side.

The three most common methods are:

• Blast SEO, which amounts to automatically creating hundreds of thousands of poor-quality backlinks with over-optimized anchors or keywords that are absolutely not relevant to your site. These links can be created via blog comments when the site is DoFollow, forums, member profiles… To top it all off, the hacker makes sure that all these links are indexed very quickly by Google. In just a few hours, your site finds itself submerged by a huge quantity of harmful backlinks!
• the removal of the best backlinks your site benefits from in order to dismantle your link profile. How does the hacker go about it? They use an email address similar to yours and, in your name, contact all the owners of the sites on which you have backlinks to request their removal. Here we are dealing with a very serious case of Negative SEO and identity theft.

Massive registrations on link farms

Still with the aim of seeing your netlinking (and your site) collapse, some malicious SEOs may also register your site on many link farms such as theglobe.net and other poor-quality directories.

Some may even go so far as to create these link farms themselves in order to have total control over them and to add links whenever they want.

With these new links, your site’s reputation and credibility take a serious hit.

While artificial backlinks are heavily penalized, poor-quality artificial backlinks are even more so.

To speed up the process, the idea is to point all the links to one and the same page. Nothing better to see a site lose precious rankings in record time…

Here again, a “backlink disavow” session with the Search Console tool is called for to escape the Penguin penalty that all sites hit by this attack will suffer.

The abuse of 301 redirects

A widely used technique in the NSEO sphere, the abusively used 301 redirect is particularly effective for sending very strong spammy signals and slapping a site with a penalty.

Negative SEO fans amuse themselves by acquiring expired domain names that have a dubious history, or even a widely known bad reputation. Then, they perform 301 redirects to the target site they want to bring down. A few dozen redirects can be enough. Google then detects that these sites with a very high spam score are redirecting to another one. The latter will then be assigned part of this spam score.

Nothing like it to damage a competitor’s SEO in a few minutes…

The practice of hijacking

Hijacking is a fraudulent practice much prized by Negative SEO actors. How do they go about it?

If your site occupies the 5th position on a given keyword, for example, hijacking consists of stealing the ranking of this target site and placing one of their own sites there instead.

Generally, the least powerful sites are easily dislodged by a new, recent site built on a more powerful expired domain name. Google gives more importance to a domain name’s authority than to a content’s seniority.

Once the high-authority domain name has been bought back, the hacker steals the content of the site they wish to replace and then takes possession of its position on the SERP, which amounts to the illegitimate theft of its authorship.

SQL injections

SQL injection-type attacks exploit the security flaws of databases and most of the time lead to server overload. This over-exploitation often leads to the display of “Too many connections”-type errors on the user’s side. An inaccessible site is very bad for SEO.

To avoid this kind of attack, an increased level of monitoring of server activity is essential. In particular, you can set up an alert system.

Of course, you must always make sure you can guarantee the minimum number of connections required based on your site’s usual traffic, but also anticipate traffic spikes.

Attacks on a site’s bandwidth, aimed at making it unavailable long enough to harm its good ranking, are also frequent. Hackers use networks whose purpose is to saturate the target site.

The DDOS attack, a classic

The DDOS attack (Denial of Service) is undoubtedly one of the most common in the world of cybercrime, and the SEO world is not spared. It consists of making access to a site very difficult, or even completely impossible.

This has a double negative impact:

• as they keep waiting, the user is discouraged from consulting the pages they were looking for, the bounce rate skyrockets and the site in question plummets;
• the exploration of the site by the Googlebots is extremely slow and may even contain errors, which sends a very bad signal.

The most strategic hackers make sure to render the site unavailable during the night, at the time when the webmaster has the least chance of noticing it, and above all of being able to react.

DMCA takedown requests

The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is an American law whose purpose is to fight against copyright infringement and to remove content considered abusive. Originally, this law was therefore used to request the removal of plagiarized content and thus to punish a person who uses content that does not belong to them, while claiming to be its author.

Following a report, the site’s webmaster receives a notification in the Search Console indicating that an infringement has been committed. While the procedure is easy and fast, it opens the door to numerous abuses and delights NSEO fans.

Apparently, Google does not carry out any verification and de-indexes the reported pages just as quickly. Unfortunately, many cases report that content has been removed on the basis of erroneous reports. All it takes is a request to remove a piece of content that ranks extremely well on a strategic keyword to see your traffic drop terribly…

How to detect a Negative SEO attack?

Unfortunately, it is impossible for you to anticipate a Negative SEO action carried out against you. However, plugging certain tools into your site and adopting a few best practices will allow you to quickly detect whether your site is the victim of an attack. If your site is your livelihood, the following actions must be carried out every day to cover your back.

Search Console and Analytics: your best indicators

As a webmaster or SEO manager, you must take a look at the Analytics and Search Console tools at least once a day. They are excellent revealers of your site’s health, giving you a view of its traffic, its lead acquisition, its backlinks, its indexed pages…

As soon as you notice suspicious activity: a sudden variation in audience, an unexplained increase in the number of indexed pages or backlinks, a sudden unavailability of your site, or other things: sound the alarm IMMEDIATELY! In the event of an NSEO attack, every minute counts. First, try to identify what element could explain this change. If no one who legally has control over the site is behind these actions, then you are the victim of an NSEO attack.

Carry out all the necessary checks and be extra vigilant, especially if the suspicious activity recurs several days in a row.

Keep in mind that if you have once been in the sights of malicious hackers, this situation can happen again unexpectedly.

Monitoring your backlinks

Netlinking is one of the most powerful levers of your SEO. While a few excellent links can propel you to the top, a handful of bad links can completely destroy your site’s reputation and turn Google against you!

To quickly identify backlinks coming from spammy domains, PBNs and other poor-quality directories, setting up automated backlink monitoring is the most effective solution.

The Monitor Backlinks tool detects Negative SEO attacks for you and alerts you in real time if it notices suspicious activity!

Watching for duplicate content against you

Fighting against duplicate content is no easy task given the multitude of websites found on Google. To help you identify sites that engage in duplicate content using your content, you can use the Positeo, Copyscape or even Kill Duplicate tools. Starting from a URL, these small pieces of software analyze the similarity rate between your content and that on all the sites indexed on Google.

However, if you suspect a particular site of plagiarism, the most suitable tool is Webconfs.

Ranking drops

The sudden loss of rankings for your site is one of the first telltale signs of an NSEO attack against you. Once again, the essential SEO tools will be your most precious allies for monitoring the evolution of your site’s rankings. Through a tool like Ahrefs, you can easily detect abnormal fluctuations of your site on the SERP.

Server log analysis

An inspection of the server log file also provides you with valuable information when it comes to detecting an NSEO attack.

In particular, you can spot suspicious behaviors such as dubious connections, abnormal server overloads or overly frequent visits from Googlebots.

What to do in case of an NSEO attack on your site?

Regardless of the nature of the Negative SEO attack you are undergoing, there’s only one watchword: (re)act fast

Contact a professional

If you suspect a malicious action against you and you have trouble identifying the source of the problem, or you do not have the technical skills to solve the problem, call on an expert without further delay. Provide them with all the necessary access (Search Console, Analytics, server, back-office…) so that they can be operational as quickly as possible. Faced with such a situation, the main challenge is to limit the damage and stem the attack before it gets too big.

Semji is at your disposal to help you deal with such a situation.

Communicate the situation to your clients and your circle

If you are the victim of Negative SEO, there’s no point trying to hide it. It is much more relevant to communicate the situation on all of your social networks, but also to your clients.

In the event that the hacker goes and posts a multitude of bad backlinks against you, it is important to specify that you are not behind them. Leaving room for doubt could strongly tarnish your reputation.

Playing the transparency card will also allow your professional circle to be extra vigilant, and perhaps also to help you find the culprit…

Take the necessary actions with Google

If you observe duplicate content against you for NSEO purposes, it is necessary to ask Google for the removal of the duplicated content in question in order to avoid the penalty, if it is not already too late. The same goes for backlinks: you will need to compile, as quickly as possible, a comprehensive disavow file to submit to the Search Console.

If you are facing NSEO, do not make the mistake of wanting to retaliate with the same kind of method. You would in turn fall into illegality and risk attracting even more problems…

How to protect yourself against Negative SEO attacks?

As we have seen, followers of Black Hat SEO techniques have more than one trick up their sleeve to harm your site’s ranking. Here are a few tips to “limit the damage” in the event of an attack, and to try to protect yourself as best you can from the crooks.

Setting up alerts

The famous log analysis can prove even more useful if you take care to set up alerts to be informed as soon as an NSEO attack is initiated against you. This allows you to gain in responsiveness; time is a precious commodity in this type of situation.

During the attack, you can also monitor the logs in real time to better understand what it’s about.

Monitoring your site’s accessibility

Beyond penalizing your position on the SERP, an inaccessible site damages your reputation, harms UX and also your revenue if you have an e-commerce site or if you earn money through advertising. For this reason, you must absolutely make sure your site is accessible.

If you entrust your hosting to a professional, their role is to warn you if they notice an anomaly. Is your site your livelihood? Then you must absolutely make sure you have the highest possible level of security. Do everything you can to prevent hackers from getting in.

If you suffer bandwidth attacks, setting up a load balancing system will allow you to keep your site afloat if the main server were hit.

Daily monitoring of rankings and backlinks

All the elements revealing your SEO ranking must be monitored through the Search Console, Analytics or the Ahrefs tool, for example. The best thing is to build yourself a panel of tools that cover all the important SEO indicators.

By keeping a constant eye on your link profile, your anchors, your traffic and your position on the SERP, you will be able to react quickly if needed.

For most NSEO attacks, there really is no miracle solution to protect yourself 100%. Hackers intervene without warning: that’s precisely the problem. Always on the lookout for new loopholes, they have a knack for constantly innovating in their processes to catch their targets by surprise.

After becoming aware of the risks involved, the best attitude to adopt aligns with the saying “Better safe than sorry.” In SEO, it’s the same: you must maintain an increased level of surveillance at all times. Use all the tools at your disposal to keep an eye on the areas prone to attacks and intrusions! If you lack the time and/or the skills to take care of it, entrust this mission to our SEO agency.