Negative SEO or Google Bowling is the practice of employing black hat SEO techniques against other websites, in an effort to get them penalised and lower their ranking in SERPs.
Negative SEO can have an incredibly detrimental effect on a website and undo all your hard work.
When hit with negative SEO, a site will either be penalised with a manual penalty or an algorithmic penalty (either Penguin or Panda).
Both of these penalties result in a drop in SERP ranking, meaning less site traffic, fewer conversions and less revenue.
This is obviously very bad, and in some cases, it can be very difficult or impossible to recover the domain.
Although, you can take a deep breath and relax because Google says that negative SEO is pretty rare, and very difficult to do.
A link farm is a form of spam and can be described as a group of websites created to interconnect to each other. They link out to other websites without their permission. If you get caught in this link web, you will be penalised.
This is when bots sweep your website for its content, and then steal it and publish it elsewhere. This can lead to penalisation for duplicated content.
Fake reviews can be incredibly detrimental to a website, company or organisation, but especially to smaller businesses.
This occurs when users/competitors review your site without having had experience with it.
Fake accounts can be created in order to do this, and sometimes infiltrate your social media accounts in order to undermine you and weaken your reputation.
While Google crawlers are a good thing and help to raise your website’s profile if you’ve been working hard on your SEO, other websites can attack you with malicious crawlers in an attempt to slow down your website.
For this negative SEO tactic, attackers will hack your robot.txt and tell crawlers to ignore vital pages on your website (the worst attacks see whole websites not indexed because of this).
While it may seem like an impossible task to come back from a negative SEO attack, there are ways to combat them.
Don’t think you’re on your own in this. There are some great tools to help you discover if you have been hit and to help you cope with it.
Are you being attacked with negative SEO and desperately need help? Contact us today and we’ll get a team to take a close look at what’s going wrong.
Meanwhile, if you want tips on how to bounce back from a negative SEO attack, you can sign up for our training courses where we spill the beans on all our SEO practises that are tried and tested.