Negative SEO refers to the unethical practice of using various strategies to harm or decrease the search engine rankings of a competitor's website. This can involve tactics such as building spammy backlinks, duplicating content, or spreading false information about the competitor, with the intention of damaging their online reputation and organic visibility.
Examples typically cited include:
- Internal site search spam: Spammers can, by entering search terms into your site search, create pages the advertise their wares including illegal items.
- Link farms: Creating numerous low-quality, spammy websites that link to the target site to make it appear untrustworthy to search engines.
- Comment spam: Posting irrelevant or harmful links in blog comments or forums, pointing to the target website.
- Hacking: Gaining unauthorized access to a website to insert hidden links, spam content, or malware.
- Duplicate content: Copying the target website's content and distributing it across other sites to dilute the original content's value.
- Negative reviews: Posting fake negative reviews about the target website or business to damage its online reputation.
The goal of negative SEO is to make a website appear low-quality, spammy, or untrustworthy to search engines, causing a drop in rankings and organic traffic.
Does Negative SEO Really Exist?
Keep in mind that there's debate as to whether negative SEO exists, or which tactics could truly harm your site. In the list above, internal site search spam is a real occurrence.
Damage from spammy links coming from link farms, may be inadvertently initiated by site owners who pay for links.
Turning on comment moderation protects against comment spam. And following good security practices protects against hacks.
Regarding duplicate content, Google's algorithms are very good at detecting the original publisher of content, so when others copy this content, it shouldn't be expected to dilute the original rankings. Site owners may want to file a DCMA takedown notice however, to prevent other sites from benefitting from the copied content.
Google will review the takedown request and can remove copied content from search results.