How Likely am I to be Targeted?

The first question to ask yourself is “How likely am I to become a target for negative SEO?” Businesses who have found a market that isn’t especially competitive or where there isn’t much money changing hands do not need to be as concerned. Positive SEO efforts on your site are usually more cost-effective than attempting to run a negative SEO campaign on a competitor, and thus your competition would rather invest in that than an attack. Rank Executives provides SEO services to dozens of domains, and thus far only two have suffered attacks – one a negative SEO attack after starting with us and another that we discovered was hacked before they signed on. Given that we deal with a wide variety of industries ranging from health and safety regulation to automotive, including highly competitive fields such as civil law, most of whom rank on the front page for their keywords, it should be comforting that only one has suffered an attack.

Part of the reason for the rarity of attacks is that most negative SEO campaigns are not effective. We’ll go into more details about some of the tactics employed and how effective they are later, but the major take-away from this is “be not afraid”. That being said, just as some people learn martial arts for defense, even though the odds of them needing it are low, it is important to know how to defend yourself just in case.

Defense Tactics

Recognizing the Attack

The first step in defending yourself against a negative SEO campaign is to recognize when you are actually under assault. This is one of the major reasons why SEO is a full-time job, it requires regular monitoring of Google Analytics to spot any fluctuations that may be damaging to your site. However, even these fluctuations might not be your competitors. There is a great article on Moz that was published six months ago that provides a fantastic breakdown of how to recognize an SEO attack.

A good way to tell what is going on is by figuring out where the links are coming from. A site-wide link from a domain, for example, could show up as tens-of-thousands of links, something that will look like an attack but is, in fact, perfectly natural and won’t result in a Google penalty. Some red flags to look for are things like exact-match anchor text (that is: keywords showing up in the anchor text of the links being built to your site), tens of thousands of new links showing up per week from multiple domains, and low quality, indecipherable content surrounding the link (like a website whose top post was discussing “the scud missile from Mt. Rushmore selling parkas”).

Disavow, Disavow, Disavow

This is a time-intensive tactic, but ultimately it is your best defense against links you do not want affiliated with your website. Among the webmaster tools that Google provides is the disavow tool, which allows you to let Google know that you did not authorize the link and could not get it taken down. The big problem with disavowing links is the amount of time it can take. When thousands of spammy links are being built to your website per month, the disavow process alone can take away time that would be dedicated towards other SEO efforts.

Keep Your Nose Clean

Google has repeatedly claimed that most negative SEO attacks are ineffective, and there is a reason for that. Their algorithm and web spam team do not consider solely the way things are, but also look at history. Thousands upon thousands of new backlinks showing up in a vacuum will not damage your site. However, if you have a history of spam or employing other black-hat tactics, you are more likely to suffer from a negative SEO campaign. This is because if you did it before and it happens again, what else would a third-party observer think except that you are up to your old tricks? That is the key to any SEO campaign, positive or negative, remembering that Google is merely an observer who tells users about the things they ask about. If string of robberies were happening on your block, for example, who would you be more likely to suspect? The man who admits he used to be a burglar but turned his life around, or your friendly but klutzy neighbor?

Vigilance

Ultimately, the best defense against negative SEO is constant vigilance. Even if your website probably won’t fall victim to an attack, it pays to do regular audits of your link profile. If you have already hired an SEO agency (like us), keep an eye on the links that they are building to your site to know whether the new links popping up are a result of their efforts or an attack by a competitor. Obviously though, a good SEO company will let you know if they believe an attack is taking place on your site, and like any other reputable service provider will endeavor to be transparent about what they’re doing.

Negative SEO Tactics

Ultimately, the best defense against any attack is knowing what form the attack would take. While I loathe providing possible tips to black-hat search engine marketers, the fact is that dozens of blogs have already given the information out. Furthermore, the benefits of people knowing what to expect far outweigh the costs of possibly arming the enemy. I’ll also go into strategies for defending against these specific tactics, note that in some cases I’ll repeat some of the points above since those general strategies do work against most of these tactics.

Spammy Link Building

This is one of the most common, easily recognized, and least effective negative SEO tactics. It involves hiring a company that engages in black-hat tactics and asking them to build thousands of links to a competitor’s website. Over a long span of time, it may result in a negative impact on rankings, but this is where judicious use of the disavow tool comes into play. As mentioned above, it will take time to disavow all of those links, particularly when they come at you in the thousands to tens of thousands, but ultimately that is usually the most damaging effect.

There are exceptions of course: some websites might find themselves decimated by this sort of attack. Websites that deal with high volumes of money (payday loan sites are a perfect example) are especially vulnerable to the link spam attack. Domains with a history of black-hat SEO tactics are also vulnerable.

Earned Link Removal

This one is a little more insidious. It requires a bit of social engineering on the part of your competitor and involves emailing webmasters and asking them to take down links to your site, pretending to be you. This exploits the paranoia over Google algorithms and the fact that many firms do not build close relationships with the webmasters who promote their content. Furthermore, in an industry that is driven by results and velocity, it is easy to forget links already built. However, SEO is like war: the only secure ground is the ground you are standing on.

To counter, keep track of every link you’ve built. Furthermore, establish ties with webmasters, make it so they know you. This way, if they receive a sudden e-mail asking them to take down a link, they can alert you. Ultimately, vigilance is your best defense against this strategy.

Good bye links!

Direct Site Hack

Yes, a website hack can also be used to hamper your SEO efforts and ruin your site’s positioning. More overt signs of a hack include altering your robots.txt to block your site, effectively de-indexing your homepage from google. Another possible option is a code injection on your site that attaches your site to a spammy webpage. In either event, your best defense is security. Make sure your CMS is fully up-to-date, and don’t use any plugins that are vulnerable to an attack.

If your best efforts at securing your site fail, there are a number of signs and symptoms that warn you that something has happened. The first alert should be if your web site begins ranking for keywords that are irrelevant to your site such as “Viagra” or “short-term lending” (unless your website provides Viagra or short-term lending). Also, be sure to check your robots.txt to make sure there were no unauthorized alterations.

CTR Attack

This is another method of manipulating Google’s algorithm that is relatively new exploits the end-game of all major search engines: giving the user what they want. Click-Through-Rate (or CTR) is a signal used to indicate what people are looking for. If most people searching for a given term click on a specific site, then it is natural to think that the site has what those people are looking for and increase its rankings. However, what if, instead, nobody clicked on their links? What if a competitor created a bot that clicked on every single link except yours? This CTR Attack can cripple your rankings, and the only hint is a sudden, sharp decline on your Analytics.

This is a more difficult tactic to counter, as the only way to counter to draw more clicks to your website. You can try to compensate with a click bot of your own, but this is a dangerous tactic and NOT recommended as if you are pushed too far down in SERPs, or worse onto the second page, then using your click-bot will look unnatural and may result in a penalty to your site.

In Conclusion…

Ultimately, most people don’t have to worry about negative SEO attacks, but it’s just like any other rare event: you do not assume it will never happen, but simply prepare just in case it does happen. Your website was a massive investment, and your position in search engine results in factors into your livelihood, so you cannot take any chances. Ultimately, the trick is to stay vigilant, and check your analytics on a regular basis. Look for unusual trends and, when they appear, learn how to adapt. It is something we do here for all of our clients, and a practice I highly recommend you adopt.

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As we all know, Google has been and continues to be the premier search engine.  In 2013 they controlled over 69% of the search market, and haven’t really given up much of that share in the past several years.  Due to this incredible market domination, SEO has primarily been focused on obtaining results specifically with Google in mind, and for good reason.  But, as a child gains more knowledge while it grows and experiences more, so does Google and its search engine algorithm.  We have seen some very impactful updates over the past 3 years; from Panda to Penguin and Hummingbird and hundreds of unnamed updates in between.  In fact, some people believe that Google makes updates to their algorithm on a daily basis, which wouldn’t surprise most of us.  So, lets see if we can draw from the past to help better understand the future.

Panda

Before we can adequately understand why the Panda updated occurred, we have to go back in time to just before it was released.  In January 2011, Google handed down some severe penalties to both Overstock.com and JCPenney.com for shady or ‘Black Hat’ SEO practices.  During this point in time a large number of websites and companies from big to small were taking advantage of the immature nature of the Google algorithm, which valued sites higher who had more backlinks pointing to their domain.  In the case of Overstock, the penalty they incurred stemmed from the fact that they were encouraging websites of universities and colleges to backlink to Overstock in exchange for discounts on purchases made on their online store.  In this case, the backlinks created that were pointing to Overstock were from an .edu extension, which has historically been given more value by Google.  The result was that Overstock.com was raking near the top of thousands of search results ranging from ‘microwaves’ to ‘vacuum cleaners’.  Once Google was tipped off about this practice they immediately penalized Overstock.com, resulting in their rankings falling from the top three to between 40 and 70.

Next came JCPenney.  This penalty was more to use JCPenney as an example than it was to penalize practices that the company directly had a hand in.  JCPenney had hired an outsourced SEO company to help rank them better for keywords most associated with their business (which is probably just as many as Overstock.com).  Google wanted to send the message to other companies who were considering spending money on Black Hat SEO services that this was not an acceptable practice.  All in all, any type of effort to ‘manipulate PageRank’ was looked down upon and would be dealt with accordingly.

This is where we get to Panda.  Panda (aka Farmer) was the algorithm update that Google had been planning on releasing, even before the incidents with JCPenney and Overstock.com.  This major algorithm update came in the wake of the previous scandals and affected up to a whopping 12% of search results.  The results were absolutely devastating for many online retailers, causing many to lose all of their sales and others to go completely bankrupt.  The aim of this update was to reward those who were practicing ‘White Hat SEO’ (or proper outreach and link building) and penalize those that were buying thousands of backlinks at a time, had too many ads on their site as opposed to actually content, or who simply did not have enough relevant content on their site to begin with. The direct effect this update had to those who relied on the Internet for their livelihood begs the question – is Google too powerful, too omnipresent, too dominating?  The fact that one corporation, in one fell swoop, could affect so many thousands of people in a direct, financial way really makes one think whether or not this is the way the Internet was meant to be.

As a result of all the tens of thousands of negative effects that Panda had on Internet sellers and consumers, Google subsequently released another update almost twice a month or more for the next 10 months.  This practice seemed to set a precedent – Google now releases various updates MUCH more frequently, with each updating seemingly having a lesser impact at one time than Panda did.  That is, until we got to Penguin.

Penguin

As the practice of building backlinks on a massive scale was penalized with the Panda update, Google then set its sites on reigning in and controlling various spam activities being utilized as a replacement to building backlinks.  After Panda, many companies shifted their practices to building higher quality links with ‘exact match anchor text’.  What this essentially meant was that SEO companies were writing content to have posted on guest blogging sites with good ranking factors.  When they submitted the article to one of these sites, somewhere in the content would be an exact match link to something the company was hoping to rank for.  For example, if you were the owner of an AC repair company, you would submit an article to a guest blog and have a link built from the exact words ‘AC repair’ to your website.

These practices eventually culminated in the creation of a link profile for that particular company to become too heavily focused on these exact match anchor text.  Most of the links pointing to their site would be tied to exactly what that site wanted to rank for. Additionally, many SEO companies also visited the article that they wrote once it was published and left more links to their clients as comments about the blog post. As Google continued to grow and change, they became aware of these tactics and immediately set out to address it.

Because this update was for Google’s entire search results, no website could ask for a reconsideration to this update.  If you are manually penalized for practices that go against the Google Webmaster Guidelines, you can usually contact Google directly and ask for them to review your site after you have removed what they penalized you for.  Many webmasters were up in arms about this due to the massive effect it had, just like Panda, on the search results for many companies.  The only solution to this update was to try and go through yourself and manually delete or un-follow all of the ‘spam’ links that were built to your site.  This could prove to be tedious or even an insurmountable amount of work.  Many web masters were forced to buy completely new domains and start from scratch!

What Does The Future Hold?

What can we pull from all the information provided above?  Simply put: Google is an ever changing, mutating company that aims to provide the most relevant search results to its users.  What does this mean to website owners who are looking into SEO?  Be VERY careful how to decide to pursue your SEO going forward.  As we have seen, practices that are acceptable today can lead to utter disaster tomorrow.  These update are immediate and can affect over 10% of all the search results that Google returns.  Make sure that you find a company that only practices White Hat SEO, and is future oriented.  There were some companies, such as Rank Executives, that did not practice any of these ‘spam’ tactics in the past and thus their client base that they serve did not experience the impact that these updates had on other websites.  We anticipated the changes coming and made sure that our tactics going forward would only compliment your website and link profile.

Matt Cutts, director of anti-spam at Google, recently came out with some comments that caused quite the stir in the Search Engine Optimization community.  One of the more safe practices in the past for building a link profile has been to offer guest posts on various blogs.  Cutts came out not even a month ago and said that ‘you should probably stop’ if you are using guest blogging as a means to acquire links in 2014.  As usual, Cutts did not speak in absolutes, but we can expect a change in the way guest blogs are valued by Google in the near future.  For now, the practice remains fairly safe, as long as you aren’t writing awful content, laden with grammatical errors and sending back links to you or your client’s site with this poor material.  Google is looking for high quality, well-written content and will likely start to penalize guest blogs it views as being ‘spammy’.  While banning all guest posting as a means to gather new links will likely not lose all of its value, you should move forward as if any guest post could eventually be analyzed and deemed as poor quality content, thus resulting in a penalty for your backlink.

As we can clearly see, the world of Search Engine Optimization is one that is always mutating into another monster, day after day, month after month and year after year.  It is best to try and keep foresight in mind when building and accepting links early this year.  A change is coming, and as we have seen before, those who are on the receiving end are likely not to be happy campers.

Brenton Squires
COO Rank Executives

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