Negative SEO
Negative SEO
From time to time you hear people talking about negative SEO and how their rankings have slumped due to some competitor doing a negative SEO attack on their site. Always easy to use some kind of excuse rather than look at your own techniques and most of the time its simply not enough work being done on a website that will result in rankings and traffic starting to slip. We have heard John Muller from Google say things like dont worry about someone giving you a nice GSA blast, Google is clever enough to pick that type of thing up and discount those links. And I’m almost certain that’s right, through testing I cant see these things having any major negative impact and i test a lot of things.
Or maybe you simply disavow that kind of thing if it happens to you and try and keep yourself a clean backlink profile. But does Negative SEO work, is it a thing, can someone actually do damage to another person’s rankings?
Does Negative SEO Work?
In my opinion, if we can manipulate search results as SEO people in a positive way, then, of course, you can reverse that trend it can be done but not the way you think it’s done, a negative GSA blast is old school and Google will simply ignore that type of garbage style of links, its automated, its an easy pattern for Google to see and simply won’t do the damage. In fact, you may even give your competitors a little bit of a boost and I’m sure no-one out there wants to lend the competition a helping hand.
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However, in the above podcast, I had Bradley Bennett on the show, great guy and knows his stuff and he actually started out in SEO doing negative SEO, trying to stop people selling replica basketball shirts ranking so high.
In this episode, he also talks about a competitor who has been trying to sabotage his fathers business and how they have been successful in doing so to some degree. You can watch the full interview above to get the full story on that, but yes sadly some people are using techniques that can cause harm to a business.
How do you do negative SEO?
Personally I would always advise you to concentrate on your own SEO efforts and beat the competition that way, your time and effort are best spent working on your own assets than trying to have a negative impact on someone else’s website and of course it wouldn’t be fair to share the easy way of going about doing this type of work as the more people who do it, the more businesses can get hurt.
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Dont look for negative SEO options that work, there are many different people talking about how they might do this that and the next thing, to do this properly you would need to spend as much time, effort and money to harm someone’s business and it simply isn’t worth it.
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Negative SEO Consultancy
If you find yourself on the receiving end of negative SEO and want some consultancy to help you combat it, I do offer reputation management services where I can help you in a number of ways with that side of things simply get in touch with me and ill be more than happy to help.
Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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