# Negative SEO

Category: [Link Building & Off-Page](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/category/link-building-off-page/) › [Link spam & risks](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/category/link-building-off-page/link-spam-risks/)

**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.

```
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
```

## Related terms

- [Link spam](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/link-spam/index.md)
- [Toxic backlinks](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/toxic-backlinks/index.md)
- [Disavow links](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/disavow-links/index.md)
- [Link profile](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/link-profile/index.md)
- [Hacked site](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/hacked-site/index.md)
- [Manual action](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/manual-action/index.md)
- [Link spam update](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/link-spam-update/index.md)

## Sources

- [Spam policies for Google web search – Google Search Central](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies)
- [Disavow links to your site – Search Console Help](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487)
- [December 2022 link spam update – Google Search Central Blog](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/12/december-22-link-spam-update)

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Last updated: October 7, 2026
URL: https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/negative-seo/