Guest contributor Matt Beswick on how to protect yourself from negative SEO—and why such tactics may not be worth the trouble in the first place.
For years, Google has fought a seemingly endless battle with spammers and other nefarious individuals who have attempted to manipulate the search engine’s algorithms in order to improve the search ranking of their websites.
Google processes approximately two-thirds of all search queries on the internet, making it a desirable target for website owners who are looking to drive more traffic to their own sites by whatever means necessary.
The result has been an escalating arms race between Google and spammers. Google, which is looking to maintain the integrity and usefulness of its search results, has constantly updated its software to counteract specific strategies that the spammers use to manipulate search results. However, in recent times, each major change tended to produce unwanted collateral damage that created even more problems for those website owners who played by the rules.
Here comes the Penguin
The latest salvo in this war was Google’s “Penguin” update, which was designed to alter the way that Google uses back links to rank websites.
Traditionally, Google used the quantity of back links as one important factor in determining the relevancy of a website for a specific search result. However, spammers were able to exploit this concept by littering the web with irrelevant links.
In response, Google changed the SEO game and unleashed the Penguin update to counteract the saturation bombing of links that only served to reduce the relevance of its search results. In the future, Google’s algorithm would focus more on the quality—not the quantity—of a website’s back links. If a website engaged in any suspicious tactics, the aim was that it would only do damage to itself.
A new enemy
Unfortunately, this opened the door to perhaps the most detestable practice in search engine manipulation: negative SEO.
Unlike traditional SEO marketing, which attempts to improve a website’s search ranking by focusing on the user experience, negative SEO is the internet equivalent of an underground insurgency. Instead of improving one’s own search ranking, negative SEO attempts to destroy the rankings of one’s competitors. By spamming a website with low-quality back links, unscrupulous website owners could potentially use Google’s Penguin update as a first-strike weapon against innocent victims.
The truly insidious problem with these tactics is that it is very difficult to protect a website against a spammer who is committed to attacking it. It is easy for a website owner to avoid practices, such as buying links or creating dummy sites, that Google does not endorse, but it is almost impossible to prevent someone else from doing the same thing.
There have been rumors that Google may follow Bing and allow website owners to disavow such links in the future, but that is little help for a website that is under attack today.
Can this really happen?
I’m going to be completely honest here: I’ve never seen a cut and shut case of a site being hit purely by negative SEO. Historically, if a site had been penalised then it was generally something they’d done themselves, but a number of people with far more knowledge than me have definitely seen instances of it working.
For smaller or new sites that don’t have an authoritative link profile it would probably be quite easy to instigate a penalty by throwing a few hundred thousand exact match links at it.
Having said that, I still believe that Google isn’t evil and a quick submission through webmaster tools would be enough to start the ball rolling on a recovery. The truth is though, at this size, the benefits to a competitor would be smaller than the cost involved in a negative campaign, and the risks of getting caught (and outed or sued) make it even less worthwhile.
How to fight back
At this point, the best way to fight back against the risk of negative SEO is to build a quality link profile that can counteract the deleterious links. By producing quality content that engages readers, websites can obtain legitimate back links from authoritative sites, which will act as a moat that will insulate a website from the efforts of spammers.
In short, website owners should just continue to focus on the positive SEO strategies that have been proven to improve search rankings.
It is interesting to note that negative SEO is not a new tactic, but it has taken on added significance in the aftermath of the Penguin update. Regardless, the use of negative SEO strategies is generally overblown, and the chances that such tactics are used on any given website are very slim.
Negative SEO is a time-consuming endeavor, and its purported benefits are disputed within the industry. At this moment, website owners should certainly be cognizant of negative SEO tactics, but they probably should not lose too much sleep over it.
