Negative SEO aims to reduce a page’s rankings in the SERPS. This article looks at the methods, so you can ensure your site is not a victim of negative SEO.
Why Use Decrease Rankings of Competitor Sites (and thus improve your rankings)
1. Decrease rankings of competitor sites (and thus improve your rankings)
2. Crisis management i.e., push down negative news
How To Do It?
- If a negative post is made on a forum, you can request that the moderators remove the content.
- Promote pages that are not in direct competition with you but in competition with your competitor. This is called Google Insulation. Or you also promote the positive content on a site to move the negative down.
- Google Bowling is a designing technique to remove sites by convincing Google they are spammy. You could do this by adding links to the site from bad neighborhoods, spammy pages, and link farms – if you get enough, i.e. thousands, and they show up in the results, this triggers a spam alert. Thus, rankings drop. Matt Cutts has stated this is very difficult to do but is something you should still be aware of
- Infect the site with a virus, so viewers flagged it as being potentially dangerous.
- Tattling is when you inform Google that a site is going against its guidelines. E.g., report on paid links (you could set this up yourself), theft of content and images, etc.
- Please make your own spam site and use a similar URL to your competitor, same domain registrar, hosting service, copy their Meta tags, and content of the homepage. Now try and get your site banned! Then 301 to your competitors’ site, and their rankings should dip because of the association.
- Create a site with the same content as your competitor and try to get indexed it first, so your competitor’s content is seen as duplicate.
- Simultaneously flood your competitor’s site with requests, so you block up their bandwidth, thus cuts off access to the rest of the world. When a site is unreachable when google tries to crawl it, this has negative consequences for the rankings of the site.
- If your competitor is running PPC ads, then set up a team to click on it a few times a day. So their budget gets used up.
- If your competitor’s site uses Adsense, then you can click on their adverts on their site many times until the AdSense suspends their account.
Should I do it?
Generally, it is not recommended as you cannot do it effectively without going against Google’s guidelines and damaging another site.
As a human being, you should not do these things. Use your ethics in humankind!
