The Basics of Negative SEO Practices

A negative SEO is a technique which uses certain unapproved methods to attack the site ranking of competitors on popular search engines like Yahoo, Google, Bing and more. There are certain rules and algorithmic factors which are followed by the major search engines during the ranking process of any website. If a website fails to follow the set rules, then it will never be indexed by the search engines. A person who is master of such manipulations can easily use them for some destructive purpose like attacking the website ranking of their competitors.

What is the use of Negative SEO?

Any business which is successful risks becoming a target of attacks, negative reviews or sometimes, outright smears, from the competition, disgruntled customers and personal enemies. Now if this negative review is successfully combined with search engine optimized content in a publicly viewable page on the Web, it can make its way to first page of Google or other search engines where prospective customers search for the companies or products. Such a high ranked negative review will adversely affect the company name or its brand image for sure. Actually such negative SEO techniques are mostly used for reducing the search engine rankings of particular website. Sometimes, negative SEO is referred to as search engine diminishment.

Different Types of Negative SEO

We are discussing below few methods used for negative SEO and sometimes any combinations of these are also used for more effective results:

1. Insulation - In this negative SEO technique a search engine orientation company creates lots of positive articles for some product or site and then runs few positive techniques on these articles. This can help in pushing all the negative reviews down on the search engine ranking.


2. Tattletale - In this service, a SEO expert regularly monitors the website of competitor and immediately reports any unauthentic activity like black hat SEO practices to the search engines to pull down their page ranking.


3. Similarly, purchase of links from reputed sites is prohibited for hiding links on their own site. By reporting that your competitor is doing something unethical, they can get penalized.


4. Copying the content - If your website is search engine friendly, you can also publish some copy of a negative site or article to your site. In case two or more web pages have identical information, several search engines start favoring the higher ranked pages as a result of which ranking of 'other' page will go down.


5. Copyright Takedown Notice - If somebody notifies the search engine about an offending website which has breached copyright issues, then search engines can remove that site from their rankings for a period of 10 days, or even forever if no dispute is raised. By requesting a takedown under DMCA copyright rules, you get a chance to rebuild your online reputation.

There are many advanced negative SEO options used in attempts to reduce or negatively affect another site's rankings and reputation. These can include Google Bombing, link farm inbound linking, false takedown requests to link partners, and other methods. For more information about how negative SEO techniques can adversely affect a website, visit www.adverseseo.com