How To Remove Negative SEO

Negative SEO is when a competitor or other actor does something that leads to a drastic drop in traffic and rankings for your website. The problem with negative SEO is that you often have no idea that it has happened until it is too late. I do not condone negative SEO, nor do I ever practice it. But it does happen to the webmasters who have the best intentions in mind. Let's take a look at the different types of negative SEO that can have a drastic impact on your website.

Spammy Backlinks

99% of the time, this strategy will never work. Google has built in safeguards to keep you from getting hurt by competitors who do this type of SEO attack. Low-quality links en masse will not count against your search engine rankings. But we uncovered some type of negative SEO attacks that work in a discussion on Reddit. Here is what we found in this Reddit discussion:

• A mysterious "acquirer" was approaching websites about a possible acquisition. 
• Over time, negative backlinks started taking impact on these websites.
• The websites linking to the target were often hacked sites that were cloaking the negative links.
• The websites linking to the target were often in the adult-themed space.
• This type of SEO attack is particularly hard to catch.
• This type of SEO attack is done at a very large scale so that it hurts.

How To Prevent This Negative Type of SEO Attack

• Audit your website links regularly.
• if anything looks suspicious, disavow it. 
• Perform this task monthly.

Duplicate Content for Negative SEO

This is a common negative SEO attack that competitors can undertake. En masse, they copy and paste your content on other websites that they create. These types of negative SEO attacks can come in a wide variety of different forms. Essentially, there are two ways to do it:

• Build the content on a domain that has more authority than yours.
• Build the content on a newer domain and make the domain have more authority than yours.

If you are working on a dropshipping store, you may have noticed this before. You pull the website products from your vendor, but they never quite rank because Google recognizes the website has superior authority. 

How to Prevent Against This Type of Attack

This type of attack is moderately hard to prevent. You can start by making sure that your content is updated regularly. You can do some things on your website from a technical perspective to prevent against this:

• There are WordPress plugins that prevent copying and pasting and scraping. 
• There are also Shopify apps that prevent against copying and pasting. 

The SEO Heist

Many people heard about the Great SEO Heist, where a website stole a whole bunch of content by copying the sitemap and rewriting it with AI. This is a type of SEO attack that is really hard to prevent against. In fact, you need to employ legal protection for your website to prevent against this type of attack. Here are our recommendations:

• Copyright and trademark any of the content that you produce for your website if it is truly unique.
• Consult with a patent attorney or an IP attorney to see what your recourses are if someone attacks your site in this manner.

How to Prevent Against This Type of Attack

There isn't a good way to prevent against this type of attack. Your best response and defense to this content comes offline.

Canonicalization Attack

Canonicalization is a good way to help prevent duplicate content on your website from taking your own website. For example, let's say your website produces duplicate content on different, dynamic URLS. You could have a product URL that has some extra dynamic characters because of something weird with your website. Like /product-293.html, when the main URL for the product is /product.html. Canonicalization helps Google pick the right version of the product to show in search results. 

In this type of canonicalization attack, someone scrapes the content of your website and embeds it on a compromised or toxic URL. If the spam website is large enough this type of negative SEO attack will  tag the spam score to your website, thus tanking your rankings. 

Technical SEO Attacks 

There are also other types of SEO attacks to be aware of. These will happen when a hacker attempts to access your website and change passwords, embed malware, and do other things that could potentially hurt your URL. They do this for a wide variety of reasons:

• To use server resources to mine cryptocurrency.
• To improve their own rankings.
• To gain notoriety. 

How to Prevent This Type of Attack:

There isn't a solid strategy to prevent this type of attack, but there are some safeguards to take:

• Use a platform like GetFlywheel or another managed WP hosting service.
• Use hosted Adobe Commerce if you are a Magento site.
• Avoid using self-hosted solutions. 

Always backup your site and you should be able to recover quickly. Also use Sucuri to protect your URL.

Some Example Sites We Studied in a Survey That Recovered From Negative SEO

We emailed several different types of websites that looked like they had been wounded and recovered. Here is what we found:

Recipe Website 

This website was hit by several of the Google updates in late 2023 and early 2024. What the webmaster found was that several of the recipes had been copied and placed on other websites. This ultimately led to a tank in rankings. To get around this, the webmaster went in and redid several recipes. It's not impossible to copy and paste from the website. Rankings are starting to recover since these are now truly recipes that you can't find anywhere else.

Pet Care Website

This website is one that recovered from negative SEO. Some of the content was being duplicated across other websites. The key to recovery was building out better content, adding depth of content, and rebuilding the website.