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 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, and how to recover.
Spammy Backlinks
Most 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, and low-quality links en masse are usually ignored rather than counted against you. But we uncovered some types of negative SEO attacks that reportedly worked 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 a toll 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 Type of Negative SEO Attack
- Audit your website links regularly in Google Search Console and a backlink tool.
- If you see a large, sudden wave of clearly manipulative links that lines up with a ranking drop, disavow them.
- Check 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:
- Publish the content on a domain that has more authority than yours.
- Publish the content on a newer domain and build that domain's authority above yours.
If you are working on a dropshipping store, you may have noticed this before. You pull the product descriptions from your vendor, but your pages never quite rank because larger sites with the same text have more authority.
How to Protect Against This Type of Attack
This type of attack is moderately hard to prevent. Start by making your content truly original and updating it regularly. You can also do some things from a technical perspective:
- Use self-referencing canonical tags on every page so Google has a clear signal about the original URL.
- Publish in your sitemap and request indexing for new content quickly so Google finds your version first.
- File DMCA takedown requests with Google and the scraper's host when your content is copied.
- There are WordPress plugins and Shopify apps that block right-click copying. They stop casual copying but won't stop automated scrapers.
The SEO Heist
Many people heard about the "SEO heist," where a website copied a competitor's sitemap and used AI to rewrite their content at scale. This is a type of attack that is really hard to prevent, and your options are mostly legal and editorial. Here are our recommendations:
- Your original content is protected by copyright automatically. Register trademarks for your brand name and keep records showing when you published.
- Consult with an intellectual property attorney to see what your recourse is if someone copies your site in this manner.
How to Protect Against This Type of Attack
There isn't a good technical way to prevent this. Your best defense is content that is hard to copy, such as original data, photos, and first-hand experience, combined with legal action when needed.
Canonicalization Attacks
Canonical tags help Google choose the main version of duplicate pages. For example, your website might produce duplicate content on different, dynamic URLs, like /product-293.html when the main URL for the product is /product.html. A canonical tag tells Google which version to show in search results.
Scrapers sometimes copy your pages, including or altering the canonical tags, and publish them on spammy or compromised domains. In rare cases this can confuse Google about which version is the original. Self-referencing canonicals, fast indexing of new content, and DMCA takedowns are the best defenses.
Technical SEO Attacks
There are also other types of SEO attacks to be aware of. These happen when a hacker accesses your website and changes passwords, embeds malware or spam pages, and does other things that could hurt your site. 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 completely, but there are some safeguards to take:
- Use a managed WordPress host such as Flywheel or WP Engine.
- Use hosted Adobe Commerce if you are a Magento site.
- Keep plugins, themes and software updated, and use strong passwords with two-factor authentication.
- Use a security service such as Sucuri.
Always back up your site so you can recover quickly. Search Console's Security Issues and Manual Actions reports will also alert you if Google detects a hack.
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 drop in rankings. To get around this, the webmaster redid several recipes with original testing and details. Rankings are starting to recover since these are now 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.