Negative SEO is a practice that involves the use of malicious techniques aimed at ruining a competitor’s site ranking in Search Engine Result Pages.
It is also referred to as “Black Hat SEO”.
Some of the examples of negative SEO include:
1. Link Farming
Link Farming involves a group of website links used to generate bad links such as spammy links, and pointing these links to your website.
If Google identifies such backlinks within your site with the help of the Google Penguin algorithm, then such a site will be penalized.
2. Content Duplication
This is a strategy that spammers use, whereby content within your website is copied and published across multiple sites
3. Fake Reviews
Jealous competitors will post fake reviews about your website or product, with an aim of ruining the reputation of the brand. This leads to a negative impact on Local SEO.
4. Forcefully Crawling a Website
This is where a competitor forcefully crawls your site a number of times, leading to a heavy server load, which may result in a downtime on your site. Search engines are hence likely to lose an element of trust on your site.
5. Hacking
A hacked website can have malware easily added to it as well as other configurations performed such as deleting your robots.txt file hence ruining your site ranking.
6. Fake Social Profiles
This is where spammers create fake social media profiles with a specific brands’ name and publish harmful or low quality content in order to negatively impact the brands’ reputation.