What is negative SEO?

If your rankings have taken a mysterious plunge with no obvious explanation, you may suspect you’ve been targeted by negative SEO tactics. Negative SEO is the deliberate manipulation of the way the search engines view your website in order to slash your rankings. 

The most basic tactic is to spam a site with dodgy links. An unscrupulous competitor can buy spammy links by the thousands for as little as $5 and direct them all to your site, carpet bombing your rankings and putting you in the firing line for a Google penalty. This used to be a common irritant for business owners but thankfully it’s much easier to manage now by link cleaning and link monitoring.

Negative SEO has gotten more sophisticated over time – and more difficult to detect. The search engines place a huge emphasis on quality, trustworthiness and popularity. More importantly, the method they use to rank sites is not infallible. Saboteurs can use this to cripple a site’s rankings by making them look bad.

Their tactics can include artificially lowering a sites relative click-through rate from search with bots that repeatedly Google important keywords and then click repeatedly on any search result that isn’t your site, sending search engines the false signal that users are ignoring your site. That might lead them to rank your website lower because they think your site doesn’t give users what they want.

What can we do?

You may suspect you’ve been the target of an attack. You may even have evidence. Unfortunately, having proof might not alleviate the damage done to your rankings.

We specialise in analysing and diagnosing ranking drops, with our Forensic SEO experts manually poring over every aspect of your site from your content to your code. If your site has been sabotaged, we’ll find the problem.

Once we understand what’s causing the drop, we work with you to establish a clear plan to recover your rankings.

We can adapt our methods to suit your budget and capabilities, but they may include a robust link cleaning process, getting a manual penalty lifted, and establishing a long-term strategy to strengthen the security of your site so that similar attacks will have less impact in the future.

With the right plan in place, you can recover from negative SEO and reclaim your place in the search engines.

If you’d like to enquire about our negative SEO analysis services, click on the button below, complete our contact form or give us a call on +44 (0) 3301 333480.