What is negative SEO? Negative SEO refers to the practice of maliciously harming other websites in order to reduce their rankings in the search engines. Some unscrupulous SEOs can indulge in black hat tactics to reduce the reputation of a competitors website.

These can include gaining illicit access to a website to modify on-site content in order to create the impression of a poor quality or black hat website. This can also include creating low quality or spammy links to your website. Another tactic can involve creating duplicate copies of your website, in order to get you targeted for duplicate content.

Duplicate content is frowned upon by the search engines, so your site can be confused as being a copy whereas the actual copies can be seen to be originals.

Bad links are a frequent cause of negative SEO.

How can you tell if you’ve been hit by negative SEO? Well, apart from noticing that your keyword rankings have fallen, you can take a look at your link profile. Use a tool such as Majestic SEO or OpenSiteExplorer to analyse your backlink profile. This will detail most or all of the links pointing in to your business website. You can then analyse the quality of each site or domain linking in.

Sifting through thousands of links can be difficult and tiring for most business owners. Fortunately, Net66 can effectively analyse your backlink profile to determine whether or not you’ve been a victim of Negative SEO.

We can then take appropriate remedial actions to get your website back up in the rankings.