The Most Sinister Negative SEO Attack

Over the years, Google has gotten pretty good about making negative SEO very hard to do. In order to bomb a competitor, you have to spend thousands of dollars to do your negative SEO attack at a scale that just doesn't make sense for a business's resources. Here are some negative SEO attacks that take a significant amount of resources to implement:

• Canonicals: Using a toxic website to target a competitor. In order to do this type of attack, the person partaking in negative SEO would need to acquire a toxic domain and basically rebuild the target website. 
• Backlink Bombing: You need thousands of URLs and backlinks in order to toxically target a competitor's website. 
• CTR Manipulation: You're going to have to do this at a scale that will wreck your marketing budget.
  

Essentially, negative SEO theoretically requires a huge scale of economies to be successful and a webmaster won't likely ever have to worry about a competitor doing something at scale that will hurt them. However, we recently discovered during an audit a type of negative SEO that could potentially hurt a website. 

What Is Negative SEO? 

Negative SEO is an attack on your website by a competitor. Or someone who wants to use your website in an illicit manner to increase rankings on their site and do things like generate cryptocurrency. Essentially, Google will take notice of what is happening on your site and penalize your website.

Note: We do NOT do negative SEO. We help clients discover if they are victims of an SEO attack if they find that a drop in traffic is not easily explainable. We are forensic SEO experts and can help uncover if someone is tinkering with your website. 

Unfortunately, in most negative SEO attacks, you will never be able to find out who is doing the attack on your website. There are certain things that you can do, however, in order to protect your website from a negative SEO attack.

The DMCA Negative SEO Bomb

We discovered this type of negative SEO attack when we were analyzing some sites in our portfolio. We noticed a traffic drop of about 35% on the website.

 

What caused the decline in traffic. We started looking at all the possible culprits. We didn't see any bad backlinks in the search console report. We did see some interesting things in Moz. We saw that there was a site that was a 301 redirect to our client's website. We noticed that the website was listed in the Lumen Database as part of a DMCA notice and when we looked for the website it had a DMCA notice attached to it.

How Does a DMCA Website Linking To Yours Hurt?

If a website with a DMCA takedown notice is linking to your website, the damage is negligible. If the website is 301 redirected to the target website, Google can start to think that the target website is associated with what was listed in the DMCA takedown. You might not always see the 301 redirected URL in your search console report. You'll see the backlinks to the 301 redirected website in your link report in Search Console, but you'll have to drill down further into the report to see the true target URL. 

Here are some of the factors to consider if a competitor is doing a negative DMCA bomb on you:

Google tracks domains that have been penalized for DMCA violations, and if a large number of backlinks or redirects from a suppressed domain start pointing to a competitor, Google might flag the receiving site for potential copyright infringement or association with low-quality content. This could create an unwanted connection between the penalized domain and the competitor, potentially harming their reputation in Google's algorithm.

Additionally, if the suppressed domain has a large number of toxic backlinks—such as spammy, low-quality, or DMCA-flagged links—these could pass negative link equity to the competitor. While Google has mechanisms to detect unnatural linking patterns, a sudden influx of questionable links could require manual intervention, such as submitting a disavow file to prevent any potential ranking penalties. Google’s handling of redirected penalized domains varies.

In many cases, Google does not transfer the penalty directly through a 301 redirect. However, if the redirected domain has a history of duplicate content, piracy, or spam, Google may treat the receiving site with suspicion. In some instances, Google may simply ignore the redirected domain altogether, preventing any link equity—whether positive or negative—from being passed on.

How to React To a DMCA Domain Redirect In Negative SEO

1. Monitor Incoming Redirects & Backlinks

• Regularly check your Google Search Console (GSC) > Links section for unexpected referring domains.
• Use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Majestic to detect redirects and new backlinks.
• Set up Google Alerts for your domain name to get notified of unusual activity.

2. Disavow Suspicious Links

• If toxic links or redirects appear, submit a disavow file in Google Search Console to prevent them from passing negative link equity.
• Google provides a Disavow Tool where you can upload a list of unwanted domains.

3. Report the Redirect to Google

• If a competitor is using malicious redirects, report the activity to Google via the Spam Report Tool or Google’s DMCA Complaint Form:
  • Report Web Spam
  • DMCA Report Form

4. Strengthen Your Website’s Authority

• A strong, authoritative site is less likely to be negatively affected by spammy redirects.
• Regularly publish high-quality content, earn genuine backlinks, and maintain good user engagement to signal credibility to Google.

5. Set Up Google’s Security Features

• Enable Google Safe Browsing and regularly check for manual actions in Google Search Console.
• Keep an eye on the "Security & Manual Actions" section to ensure your site isn’t flagged.

6. Use Canonical Tags & HTTPS Strict Transport Security (HSTS)

• Implement canonical tags correctly to signal your original content and reduce the impact of duplicate content issues.
• Enforce HSTS to prevent unauthorized redirections by ensuring browsers only connect to your site over HTTPS.

7. Contact the Hosting Provider of the Redirecting Domain

• If the malicious domain is hosted by a known provider, file a complaint with the host or registrar.
• WHOIS lookup tools like Whois.domaintools.com can help identify the hosting company.

8. Legal Actions as a Last Resort

• If the redirect is clearly malicious and intentional, consult a lawyer about potential action under copyright laws, unfair competition, or cyber harassment statutes.
• Send a Cease & Desist letter to the domain owner if their actions are harming your business.