What are the common types of Negative SEO attacks?

Story Based Question

Imagine you’re running a popular website for vegan recipes. Everything’s going great until one day, your search rankings plummet. You investigate and find several strange issues: hundreds of spammy links pointing to your site, duplicate versions of your recipes on shady websites, and an influx of bad reviews on your social media pages.

This situation leaves you baffled. You wonder, “What are these tactics called, and are there different types of these Negative SEO attacks?”

Exact Answer

The common types of Negative SEO attacks include:

1. Spammy backlink creation
2. Content scraping and duplication
3. Fake reviews and reputation attacks
4. Hacking and malicious code insertion
5. Overloading servers with DDoS attacks
6. CTR (Click-Through Rate) manipulation

Explanation

Negative SEO attacks are unethical strategies designed to harm a website’s search rankings. Here’s a breakdown of the most common types:

1. Spammy Backlink Creation
   Attackers build hundreds or thousands of low-quality, irrelevant links pointing to your site. These often come from disreputable sources like spam directories or adult content websites. This can make Google think you’re trying to game the system, resulting in penalties.
2. Content Scraping and Duplication
   Malicious actors copy your original content and publish it on multiple websites, making it harder for search engines to identify the original source. This affects your rankings and can lead to deindexing.
3. Fake Reviews and Reputation Attacks
   Competitors or trolls leave fake negative reviews about your business on platforms like Google My Business, Yelp, or social media. This harms your online reputation and discourages potential customers.
4. Hacking and Malicious Code
   Hackers gain access to your website and insert malicious code or hidden links. This can result in search engines flagging your site as unsafe, dropping your rankings dramatically.
5. DDoS Attacks (Distributed Denial of Service)
   A flood of fake traffic overwhelms your server, causing your site to slow down or crash. This poor performance can hurt user experience and result in lower rankings.
6. CTR Manipulation
   Bots repeatedly click on your site in search results and quickly leave (a high bounce rate), signaling to search engines that your content isn’t valuable or relevant to users.

Example

Let’s revisit the vegan recipe website scenario:

1. A competitor hires someone to create thousands of spammy backlinks using irrelevant anchor text like “cheap meat recipes” or “junk recipes.”
2. They scrape your best-performing recipe, “Vegan Mac and Cheese,” and post it on multiple low-quality websites. This confuses search engines and causes your original blog post to lose visibility.
3. On Google Reviews, fake profiles leave comments like “Terrible recipes, not worth the time,” damaging your reputation.
4. At the same time, your website starts loading slowly because of a targeted DDoS attack. Users bounce, and rankings drop further.

To counter these attacks, you use tools like SEMrush to audit backlinks and disavow spammy ones, file DMCA takedown notices for copied content, and reach out to review platforms to report fake comments. You also upgrade your hosting to mitigate the effects of the DDoS attack.