Negative SEO, myth or certainty?
If you’ve heard of SEO, there’s a good chance that lately you’ve also heard of negative SEO or nSEO.
But in case you haven’t heard, let’s define both terms. SEO services means the optimization of your website to increase the organic positioning in Google, that is clear , everyone knows what it’s about today, or at least that’s what we want to think.
Negative SEO, on the other hand, is the process by which you harm another site, usually through link building tactics combined with various manipulations of the weaknesses of the platform on which your site is built.
Why would you want to do negative SEO
Why would you want to do that? Pretty simple to understand. Either out of the desire to outrank a site in the SERP that you can’t outrank otherwise, or out of spite or spite. Unfortunately, this trend is increasingly mainstream, especially on Google.com.
How did nSEO appear?
Ironically, nSEO appeared as a result of the Google algorithm updates from 2011, 2012 and 2013.
Those from Google were so focused on putting an end to the link building tactics used by webmasters that they didn’t realize that these proposed penalties can backfire on businesses that respect the rules.
Taking advantage of the fact that nowadays any unnatural link can lead to problems and penalties, many have adopted the tactic “if I can’t overcome them, I make them disappear”.
Negative SEO does not only mean sabotaging competitors’ sites
Another side of nSEO is composed of strategies that do not aim at removing the competitor’s site from the SERP, but at destroying its reputation.
The method of execution is relatively simple: you build one or more sites with negative content for the competitor, position the sites according to the competitor’s name and wait to get the desired results. And, unfortunately, these results do not take long to appear.
More and more people want to be informed with whom they do business or from whom they buy and sell products. The vast majority get information by searching on the net, especially on Google.
The most relevant search being the name of your company or even your name. If on the first page you find negative information either about the company or the name of the person with whom you want to do business, this will clearly raise alarm signals and in most cases you will not continue the collaboration.
Google recognizes the problem, but currently there are no signs of a solution
A recent article from the Search Engine Watch deals with this problem in detail. Even those from Google have started to contribute.
Matt Cutts, in an article in which he shows the difficulties of getting the expected results through nSEO< /a>, tells us that “There are more people who talk about negative SEO than those who actually do nSEO, the reason being that you can never be sure that the links you send to a competitor will not help him instead to knock it down, and besides, it’s better to use your time growing your site instead of hurting others.
But, if there are sites that are penalized due to negative SEO, they can use the disavow links tool of Google Webmaster Tools.”
A childish answer, especially because most of the time, disavow tools don’t work if you don’t notice an attempt by the webmaster to delete those “bad” links.
How can we protect ourselves from nSEO?
The means of defense are relatively close at hand. It is important to optimize your site as best as possible on-page and off-page and to solve the known hibs of the site platform that can be exploited by those who do nSEO.
Also, although it may sound narcissistic, it is good to set Google Alerts by personal name and business name. This way you will be notified when someone mentions you online.
If you need some additional advice to protect yourself from nSEO, you can contact an SEO optimization agency for consulting.