Negative SEO means deliberate attempts to harm the search rankings of another website.
Common attack forms
According to reports by Semrush, Seobility and Oncrawl, attacks take these forms:
- Large numbers of spam links, often with identical or offensive anchor text
- Hacking with injected content, malware or changed robots.txt
- Copying content to other domains (scraping)
- Fake link removal requests and fake reviews
How Google responds
Google’s spam detection system SpamBrain neutralizes manipulative links. The disavow tool is meant for sites with a considerable number of spammy links that have caused a manual action or likely will. Hacked content counts as a separate violation in the spam policies.
How to spot it
Warning signs are a sudden jump in referring domains, many links with the same anchor text, unexpected changes to titles, robots.txt or redirects, and a message under Manual actions in Search Console.
Example
A hacked robots.txt blocks the whole site for crawlers.
robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Sources
- Spam policies for Google web search – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Disavow links to your site – Search Console Helpsupport.google.com
- December 2022 link spam update – Google Search Central Blogdevelopers.google.com
Last updated: