You must understand what exactly is meant by negative SEO and whether you need to worry about it and what you can do to defend yourself from it.
As opposed to using underhand techniques to illegitimately rank your own site higher up search engine results pages (SERPs), negative SEO is about using similar underhanded techniques to attack a rival’s website and taper with their ranking.
Some unscrupulous elements can copy your website’s content and distribute it over the internet, for this reason placing you at risk of transgressing Google’s ‘duplicate content’ policy.
They can incapacitate your website speed by deliberately sending thousands of requests per second to your server.
If you have valuable backlinks from other authority sites, some mischief-makers could potentially get in touch with those sites and use your name and details and ask to have them removed.
Negative SEO can also pertain to website hacking – from removing content partially or even deleting your site totally, to changing the robots.txt file to tell search engines to stop crawling it.
There could be plans to damage your reputation perhaps through fake social media accounts set up to specifically slander your company. Negative SEO is a real threat, and countless websites have had to deal with this problem.
Google’s Matt Cutts states in his video response to negative SEO – “If you’re just a regular small business you are not likely to run up against this. There are a lot of people who talk about negative SEO, but. Very few people who try it and. Fewer still who succeed.”
Google maintains that a competitor cannot damage your site by pointing bad links at it. Even if you espy a group of seemingly bad links pointing towards your site, most probably they are not going to do any serious harm.
It is indeed true the vast majority of cases “where people report negative SEO attacks end up not being negative SEO”.
If you are running a website in a highly competitive environ and are concerned about the risks of negative SEO, (especially if you have received penalties from Google in the past), there are a few things you can do to help.
Please know that negative SEO attacks can be picked up fast and can be speedily remedied. Continuously monitor your backlinks. Ask for the bad links to be removed. You can request Google, not to take low-quality links into account when it crawls your site by utilizing the disavow tool.
Create a file containing only the links you want to disavow then upload this to Google. However, use this tool with great care, as if misused you may end up doing more significant harm than good.