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Welcome to the next-to-the-last article in our six-part series on negative SEO . If you’ve been following along, you understand what negative SEO is. You’ve audited your situation to know whether or not you were hit, and you know how to reduce your likelihood of being a target in the future. You even know how to try and defend yourself from an ongoing negative SEO campaign. Now, it is time to clean up the mess. This article is meant to serve as a companion piece to the previous articles in the series. As such, we will once again segment the recovery process into three main areas: links, content and user signals. The good news is that you can recover from attacks in any of those areas; the bad news is that, depending on what type of negative activity you’re attempting to recover from, it could be a lengthy process. Inbound links The first step is to build a disavow file of the most toxic links you have identified in your analysis of the attack. You can find more about how to structure ...

You know what negative SEO is (and isn’t). You know how to audit your site to determine if you’ve been hit. You know how to protect yourself to limit your exposure. Now it is time to discuss how to defend yourself against an ongoing negative SEO campaign. Who is attacking you? There are a variety of ways to unmask the people targeting you and your site with a negative SEO attack. Some depend on the type of attack you’re experiencing. No matter how they are coming at you, you will need to collect some information in order to shut them down. Let’s look at common attack methods and see how we can turn the tables and use what they’re doing to us — against them. Inbound links Using your favorite link analysis tool, you will need to segment the links you expect to have (your old links) to the new ones you believe are coming from an attack. This step is very easy to oversimplify because link scoring varies significantly, depending on your philosophy of links, risk tolerance and which tool y...

In previous articles, we discussed what is and isn’t negative SEO and how to determine if you’ve actually been hit by negative SEO. With the basics out of the way, it’s now time to look at how you can keep your website safe from negative SEO (search engine optimization) campaigns. To start, I have some bad news: There is no such thing as being hackproof. And there is no such thing as being negative SEO-proof! All you can reasonably do is take action to lessen the probability of becoming a victim by reducing attack vectors. This way, anyone seeking to do harm has to be more sophisticated and put forth a greater effort than they would against an average website. In this installment of our negative SEO series, we will segment SEO into three areas: content, links and user signals and focus on protecting each, as well as your site overall, from being a victim of negative SEO. Content and infrastructure Hosting.  What can your host do to keep you out of trouble? Quite a bit, actually. ...

Have you ever experienced a rankings decline and suspected it was due to something a competitor was doing? For this second article, we are going to focus on the process of diagnosing whether or not you’ve been hit by negative search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. If you need a refresher or missed the first article, here it is: What Negative SEO is and is Not. As you progress through the following steps to try and diagnose what happened, you’ll need to honestly ask yourself whether the decline you’re facing is more a result of your own actions or due to someone acting against you. It’s an important distinction; your first inclination can be to assume someone is out to hurt you, while it might actually be something as simple as accidentally no-indexing your index, disallowing critical paths in robots.txt or having a broken WordPress plug-in that suddenly duplicates all your pages with strange query parameters and improper canonicalization. In the first article, I segmented the ma...

Today we are starting a six-part series on Negative SEO. The series will be broken into three areas and will show how negative search engine optimization (SEO) has an effect on links, content and user signals. Definitions Positive SEO under this broader view would be any tactic performed with the intent to positively impact rankings for a uniform resource locator (URL), and possibly its host domain, by manipulating a variable within the links, content or user signals areas. Negative SEO would be any tactic performed with the intent to negatively impact rankings for a URL, and possibly its host domain, by manipulating a variable within the links, content or user signal buckets. But Google says negative SEO isn’t real Unfortunately, Google isn’t being entirely honest here. If you can accidentally hurt your rankings by shifting a variable, then it would logically suggest that an external entity shifting that same variable associated with your site could result in a ranking decrease or ou...

Welcome to the final installment of the Negative SEO series! Before we get started on this look into the possible future, it is important to note that –as with any prognostication — this article is going be heavily opinionated and will contain a fair amount of speculation. I base my expectations about the future of SEO upon search trends that are currently only in their infancy, so it’s impossible to say whether they’ll continue on the same trajectory. Additionally, I acknowledge that some of these new attack vectors might technically already exist but they haven’t been tested by my team or by other credible researchers that I’m aware of. The basis for the inclusion of such near-future attack vectors is to provide as much actionable information as possible (for an article about the future) and to avoid relying on too-far-out predictions. You May Also Enjoy: Part 1: What negative is and is not Part 2: How to determine if you’ve been hit by negative SEO Part 3: How to be proactive and p...