If your site’s ranking on search engines has suddenly dropped, it could be due to a number of reasons. Perhaps your data is inaccurate, you’re facing a search-engine penalty, or you’ve fallen victim to user-generated spam.
If you’ve ruled out the above causes, there may be a less likely reason for your change: negative SEO.
Negative SEO, while not common, is a malicious practice of search engine optimization that occurs when a competitor tries to sabotage your website by lowering its ranking on search engines.
Negative SEO is done through techniques like:
- Reposting the entire content of your website on another website.
- Building excessive backlinks to your website with unrelated anchor text.
- Hacking and modifying the content of your website.
Here are a few negative SEO practices to watch out for and tips to remain safe from them:
Scraping and Reposting
Most negative SEO tactics are not done on your website.
For example, culprits will often scrape the entire content of your website and repost it across several new sites. This harms your website because search engines pick one website to rank, and penalize the duplicate content on any others.
If you are fortunate, search engines will identify your website as the original source of the duplicate content.
To protect yourself from this tactic, regularly run your website’s content through plagiarism checkers like Copyscape.
If your content is duplicated anywhere else, you will know and can lodge a complaint before you’re affected.
Harmful Link Farms
Another negative SEO tactic is a competitor creating hundreds or thousands of unrelated backlinks to your website.
These backlinks usually contain redundant anchor text and can affect your position on search engines for the keywords your website is currently ranking for.
It’s impossible to prevent this tactic but you can manage it by making use of backlink analysis tools like SEO SpyGlass.
Backlink analysis tools show all of your links and where they are coming from.
If you suspect suspicious backlinks to your website, report them immediately here.
Modifying Your Website Content
On-page negative SEO is less common, but does occur.
A common tactic is hacking your website and inserting spammy links into your content.
These insertions are difficult to spot and often can only be seen by looking into your website’s code.
This tactic affects your ranking and can lead to search engines penalizing you for redirecting visitors to malicious websites.
To avoid this kind of negative SEO, regularly use a website audit tool (like this one from Semrush), which can spot changes made to your site’s code.
De-Indexing Your Site
Your website can be immediately removed from search engine results if a hacker makes a slight change to your website’s robot.txt file.
Carry out regular checks, preferably with an automatic tool that can perform them weekly or daily.
Make your website less susceptible to negative SEO by investing in security and tools that keep it up-to-date.
