What is Negative SEO, and how does it affect your website?

What is Negative SEO?

Negative SEO is a tactic within search engine optimisation (SEO) where the intent is not to improve a website's rankings, but rather to negatively affect the site's search results.
Negative SEO can, for example, involve competitors or other individuals who wish to harm your website's ranking and presence in the search engines.
Since competitors or other individuals do not have access to your website, negative SEO is carried out via off-page SEO. More specifically, by creating harmful inbound links to the website they wish to damage — for example in the form of black hat methods, links from content the website does not wish to be associated with, a large volume of hacked pages, or similar.

This will negatively affect the rankings of the linked website in the search engines if the negative SEO attempt succeeds, and in the worst case can result in a penalty from the search engines (such as Google), which completely removes the website's visibility from the results.

Have you been hit by Negative SEO? Here's how to tell!

Are you unsure whether you have been subjected to negative SEO? Perhaps because your rankings have dropped drastically, or you are generally experiencing a decline in your rankings?
There can be many reasons for falling organic rankings and organic traffic, including; algorithm updates, errors on your website, competitors working with SEO, and much more.
You should therefore investigate further before you can assess whether you have been subjected to negative SEO.

Some ways you can identify and investigate whether you have been affected by negative SEO are:

A large, unnatural influx of backlinks.
Links from hacked websites.
Links from websites with content you do not wish to be associated with.
Links using harmful anchor values.

These will be reflected in declining rankings — perhaps that is where you first notice you have been subjected to negative SEO.
Do be aware, however, that all of the above indicators do not necessarily mean negative SEO. It could also be hacked websites copying content, someone attempting to improve your website's rankings using black hat methods, etc.

I have been subjected to Negative SEO — what do I do?

If you have been subjected to negative SEO, for example in the form of a link attack, you fortunately have some steps you can take so that the negative SEO will not achieve the desired effect (or to minimise that effect).

Here is what you do if you have been subjected to negative SEO:

Identify harmful links
Request removal of links
Create and upload a disavow file
If you receive a manual penalty from the search engines, immediately request reconsideration from the search engine.

Would you like personal advice and help with Negative SEO?

It can be difficult first and foremost to determine whether you have been subjected to negative SEO, and furthermore it can have fatal consequences for your organic presence in the search engines and thus your revenue and business. It is therefore important that you act if you have been subjected to negative SEO — regardless of whether it was intended as negative SEO or not.