NEGATIVE SEO - A DIRTY BUSINESS!

DEFINITION

“Negative SEO is the practice of implementing black hat SEO techniques on another site. Usually, an SEO attack is unleashed by a disgruntled competitor and his or her minions with the goal of reducing that site's rankings.”

HOW?

MOST Negative SEO attempts use a multi-prong strategy to impact rankings. Each method attempts to get a site penalised by Panda or Penguin algorithmic filters.

Penguin And Panda - What’s the difference?

Panda rates a website based upon “quality signals”. It incorporates signals such as page load speed, reputation online and it is rumoured that social signals such as reviews are weighted within the site. Panda is now fed into the “core algorithm” and is now more important than the older Penguin.

Penguin looks at the websites backlink profile. Penalties can be given site-wide or even on a individual page. To put it into perspective a site may never recover from a Penguin penalty. Potentially devastating for any business online.

WEBSITE

REPUTATIONASSOCIATION

TECHNICAL ATTACKS

TECHNICAL ATTACKS

HACKING

There are four types of “hacking for negative SEO”

1. The more common “UGG boot” or “Viagra” hack. This is easier to find than its counterpart.

2. The “This Domain Is Parked” hack.

3. The “301/302 redirect hack”. This isn’t necessarily a deliberate attempt at negative SEO. I

call this the opportunist hack where they use your sites authority to rank for keywords and

then redirect to their website to gain sales.

4. The Vanity Hack - This isn't usually done to damage a websites rankings. Hackers do this

for vanity/kudos amongst their peers.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR YOUR BUSINESS?

1. Loss Of Traffic - More Importantly Sales/Enquires!

2. Damaging to reputation - Potential Customers May Not Return.

3. Maybe Penalised By Panda For Page Or Site-Wide - Classed As Non-Secure Site.

Google Released a Hacked Page Update On the 05/10/2016. The aim of this update was to remove

“hacked pages” from the SERP’s.

Where To Look Out For Signs

Webmaster Tools

CMS

FTP Files

Google Analytics

SEMRUSH

MOZ

EMAIL

GOOGLE SEARCH SITE:EXAMPLE.COM

THE UGG/VIAGRA HACK

• Most common out of the four types of hack.

• Not necessarily a negative SEO attempt but has negative implications on

rankings.

• Drives irrelevant traffic to the website - high bounce rate, low engagement =

Panda Factor

• Google will have built a idea of content that is relevant to you. If you start ranking

for terms that are irrelevant you will receive a warning through Webmaster Tools.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR:

1. Keep an eye on search query impressions within webmaster tools.

2. Use third party tools such as SEMRush and MOZ to check for low lying irrelevant

keyword terms on your website.

3. If you are caught out make sure you address the vulnerabilities before submitting the

site for reconsideration.

4. Google will let you know if your Wordpress is out of date through Webmaster Tools.

THIS IS A BANKING SITE? REALLY?

DOMAIN IS PARKED HACK

• Google wants to show relevant content. The “Domain Is Parked” Hack signals to

Google that the site is no longer updating content or trading online. Google will

reduce rankings and reindex sites.

• This method is difficult to spot. Hackers often hide text using the old hat method

of “white text on white background. Hackers prefer to use this method over using

meta no index tags and robots.txt disallows as its more difficult to problem solve.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR:

1. Watch out for site-wide drops in rankings.

2. Check the view-source and use find to search for “Domain is Parked”

3. If you are caught out make sure you address vulnerabilities before submitting the site for

reconsideration.

4. Google will let you know if your Wordpress is out of date through Webmaster Tools.

SNEAKY!!

LOOKS LIVE TO ME!

301/302 REDIRECT HACK

• AKA The Opportunist Hack

• Hackers use the authority of your site to rank for desired keyword terms. They

then update the .htaccess file to redirect to a page on their own website.

• Eventually 301 redirected pages will be replaced by the landing page within the

SERP’s.

• 302 Redirects are more difficult to spot as the original page will remain in the

SERP’s unless Google deems them as a non-temporary redirect.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR:

1. Watch for new landing pages within Webmaster Tools/ Analytics

2. Loss of organic traffic

3. Check the .htaccess file

4. If you are caught out make sure you address vulnerabilities before submitting the site for

reconsideration.

5. Google will let you know if your Wordpress is out of date through Webmaster Tools.

LOOKS LIVE TO ME!

CHECKS THE REFERRER THEN REDIRECTS TO MALICIOUSSITE.CO.UK/BAD.PHP

Less Traffic = Less Sales/Enquiries

OUCH!

VANITY HACK

• Hacked for kudos amongst their peers.

• Not a negative SEO attempt however, this will impact rankings.

• If you are lucky to fix the site before GoogleBot crawls you may miss a penalty.

• Hackers will usually publish a list of the sites that they have hacked. This leads

into “guilty by association”

WHAT TO WATCH FOR:

1. If you are caught out make sure you address vulnerabilities before submitting the site for

reconsideration.

2. Google will let you know if your Wordpress is out of date through Webmaster Tools.

YOU WILL KNOW IF YOUR SITE HAS BEEN VANITY HACKED

THEY WILL EVEN TELL YOU WHO THEY ARE. HUMILIATING RIGHT?

SLOW SPEEDS

• This is the most difficult method to prove. Offenders send thousands of requests

to the server similar to a DDOS Attack but with the tactic of slowing down

response times instead of taking the site down.

• Page Load Speed has a huge impact on rankings. I’ve seen sites that didn’t

complete a server transition correctly drop from position 4 to page 2 overnight.

This is a known factor of Panda.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR:

1. Check server logs

2. Check page load speeds within Analytics

3. Set up custom alerts within Analytics

RESPONSE OVERLOAD

HOT LINKING

• Offenders use hot linking to increase the amount of requests to the server.

Instead of uploading the image to their own site the image is requested from the

site under attack.

• Using large images puts you at risk of “hot linking negative SEO”

WHAT TO WATCH FOR:

1. Make sure that images are web optimised.

2. Check page load speeds within Analytics

3. Set up custom alerts within Analytics

4. Check for an increase in backlinks to the image URL.

5. Perform a image search within Google Images.

RESPONSE OVERLOAD

GUILTY BY REPUTATION

• Panda looks at your sites reputation off page. It will take into consideration reviews on

independent sites, social signals and forum sites.

• Offenders will post bad reviews on a variety of these sites. This will put off users who

would potentially be interested in buying/enquiring about your service.

• Google Panda will see the site as untrustworthy and potentially penalise the site.

WHAT TO DO

1. Encourage customers to review your product service.

2. Have a active presence on the main review sites.

3. Search for “company name reviews”

I DONT THINK SO

GUILTY BY ASSOCIATION

WHY? PRETTY SELF EXPLANATORY!

NOTE:

1. Keep an eye on backlinks.

2. This method aims to get you penalised by Penguin for link spamming.

3. Utilise the disavow file to keep on top of bad backlinks.

I’d be annoyed too

GUILTY BY DUPLICATION

NOTE:

1. Use canonical tags as a defensive measure

2. Use Absolute URL’s instead of relative URL’s. This will help to defend rankings against

content distribution.

3. Keep an eye on referrals within Google Analytics. Most offenders are lazy tbey will copy

the site without amending the analytics tags. The most common domain name choice

will be a misspelling of your domain name. Albeit, if you are suspicious of any referral

make sure you investigate.

4. Check the exclude all known bots to reduce referral spam, not only will this inflate

referral traffic but will impact metrics like bounce rate and pages per session.

• There are two ways duplication can impact your site.

1. Site Clone - Offenders will copy your site, use other negative SEO methods to penalise the

site and then redirect the penalised site to your site.

2. Content Distribution - This is a old grey/black hat way of ranking a site through article

submissions. This will be seen as an attempt to try and manipulate rankings.

It won’t cost much to get the duplicate site penalised

MORE WORK TO DO!

ANY QUESTIONS?1. Thanks to these “black hats” Webmaster’s/SEO’s now have more and more work to do.

We have to employ defensive measures and utilise tools like the disavow file more

regularly than before.

2. Penguin will be made real time which means that it is essential to highlight any

attempts of off-page SEO needs to be highlight and dealt with immediately.

3. Off-page reputation is now a key factor. Ensuring that citations including your company

name, review sites, forums are maintained and positive is essential. Customer service

now has a direct impact on your SEO.

4. Panda is now inserted into the “core algorithm” be on top of your reputation off page.

5. SEO’s now need to monitor a range of metrics closely.

Updated recently to “vast majority” the previous excerpt said that webmaster’s shouldn’t worry about negative SEO

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