“..Andrew was a bit worried. His company wanted to expand. He had just hired new staff, but over the last few months, the number of leads he was getting, had reduced tremendously. It’s just a couple of bad months he thought. This happens in every company. He approached an East European company specialized in SEO to improve his company’s ranking. They offered him to buy 1’000 links to his website promising him that it would improve the ranking on Google.
After a few days, when he compared the number of leads, he discovered that it hadn’t been one bad month as there had already been 6 bad months. When he monitored his SEO, he discovered not only that the company was not in the first 3 ranks, but also that his company ranked only on the second page of Google.…”
“Where is the number one place to hide a dead body?
The second page on Google”
Search Engine optimization can be compared to winning the popularity contest on search engines by having your site be the first one people see in a list of potential sites for the services or goods they are looking for. The ranking is being numbered 1 in this contest. Winning the competition is making your website more visible to Google. However, ranking high on Google for competitive keywords is not easy. The more popular you are on the search engine, the bigger the target will be on your back. Some people would, rather than using strong strategies to strengthen their status, use dirty tactics to harm their competitors. The threat of your competitors medaling with your website is real in financial terms.
Many companies, like Kinsta and enabler space, discovered one morning that they are the victim of such an attack which damaged their site in search engines and can be time-consuming to clean up.
Welcome to the Dark Side
The world of SEO is divided into two: the White-Hat-SEO people who believe that optimizing the site for search should be based on producing excellent content and promoting it ethically following Google’s SEO guidelines, and Black-Hat-SEO people who believe that the goal justifies the means and that manipulating search algorithms to get quicker results is better than adhering to a set of fictitious internet ethical laws. Using unethical techniques (Negative SEO) to sabotage a competitor’s rankings in search engines is a real threat.
Negative SEO attacks can take several different forms like copying content from your site and distributing it all over the internet. Another method is building hundreds of spammy links to your website using keywords like call now, poker online, credit card offers, weight loss, viagra etc.
If you conduct a search on Fiverr for “negative SEO”, you will find over 15,000 people willing to do the work for a very low price.
The biggest danger, from a business standpoint, is that your black hat SEO tactics would result in you being blacklisted by search engines. When your site is blacklisted, it does not appear in any search results, and depending on the reason for the blacklist, people who use Google Chrome will see a warning screen before they move to your site.
Sitecare.com got hit by Negative SEO. The yellow spike indicates the negative SEO using spammy websites, toward the beginning of November. The blue line indicates the website’s traffic. Why do you think the traffic reduced after November?
How To Secure Your Website Against Negative SEO Attacks?
Negative SEO happens. The best you can do is to stay informed on the different ways in which it occurs, remain vigilant, and use the latest tools to protect yourself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWJUU-g5U_I&t=140s
Take into consideration the following :
When working with new SEO partners, proceed with caution. Check references!
Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors. Google evaluates both the number and the quality of your backlinks, and the more other people are linking to your site, the higher your search rank is likely to be. Google will blacklist you if they accuse you of buying links. That means if you send out emails offering to pay for backlinks and someone reports you to Google, your rankings will suffer and you might be blacklisted. However, if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t disavow anything or you could permanently damage your rankings.
Google Disavow Tool
Google launched a tool that allows you to remove all website links which spam and attack your website to remove your ranking. You can import links, which are considered not relevant to your site (spam), upload them to Google Disavow tool not to harm your ranking on Google. Pay attention since this process can take a while.
Constantly monitor your SEO – keep track of your backlinks profile
SEMrush and other online visibility management systems have an email summary of improvements that you can use to keep track of your backlinks. Negative SEO practitioners prefer building backlinks from low-quality websites to negatively impact websites.
Let me know in the comments: Which technique do you find more useful, black-hat SEO or White-hat-SEO?
Check out my other blog posts. Which one is did you like the most? ❤️ 🤘
Resources and deeper reading:
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/page-experience
- https://search.google.com/search-console/disavow-links?utm_source=wmx&utm_medium=deprecation-pane&utm_content=disavow-links-main
- https://neonbrand.com/seo/google-blacklist/
- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-best-place-to-hide-a-_b_5168714
- https://www.spiralytics.com/blog/good-vs-bad-seo-not-get-penalized/
- https://www.fiverr.com/search/gigs?query=negative%20seo&source=main_banner&search_in=everywhere&search-autocomplete-original-term=negative%20se
- https://www.diggitmagazine.com/articles/look-behind-scenes-click-farms
Scary! But interesting and fun to read. Thanks!
Welcome to the modern age of technology 😉
Well done Nissim 🙂 Especially the link to Star Wars is an eye candy. And now to answer your question: I don’t think the question should be which technique is more useful. I could imagine that black SEO has its advantages. It comes a lower cost and requires less time, I presume (thinking of the 15’000 people willing to do the job for you). So I think it pays off, provided you know what you are doing and make sure that you don’t get caught or make sure you work with someone that knows what she/he is doing. However, I don’t think it is nice to treat your competitors like this. Rather make sure your content is more convincing and your page is userfriendly!
Thank you so much, Desiree, for your feedback. I agree that it is easy to embrace the dark SEO, but it is also dangerous. It might backfire with increased result to a website instead of “killing it”. Google is constantly battling dark SEO and it’s getting harder to manipulate it on websites.