Definition
Negative SEO refers to all malicious actions carried out by a third party to drop a competitor site's positioning in search results. The most common attacks include mass creation of toxic backlinks to the target site, duplicating its content on other sites, publishing fake negative reviews, and hacking to inject spam. While Google claims its algorithms can detect and ignore most of these attacks, some can still have significant impact, requiring the use of the link disavow tool and constant monitoring of the backlink profile.
Key Points
- Regular link profile monitoring is essential for detecting attacks
- Google's disavow tool is the primary defense against toxic links
- Google Search Console enables alerts for anomalies
Practical Examples
Toxic link attack
A competitor creates 10,000 links from gambling and adult content sites to your site, triggering an algorithmic penalty for unnatural links.
Content scraping and duplication
Your content is copied and published on dozens of sites before Google indexes your original version, creating a duplicate content problem where your site is no longer considered the source.
Frequently Asked Questions
Regularly monitor your backlink profile in Google Search Console and tools like Ahrefs or Majestic. A sudden and abnormal increase in links from suspicious domains, adult content, or unrelated foreign sites is a sign of an attack.
Quickly identify toxic links, attempt to contact webmasters to have them removed, then submit a disavow file via Google Search Console. Document all evidence of the attack and consider legal action if the perpetrator is identifiable.
Go Further with LemmiLink
Discover how LemmiLink can help you put these SEO concepts into practice.
Last updated: 2026-02-07