Let us analyze the reasons
Posted: Thu Jan 30, 2025 6:43 am
Some negative SEO practices go even further, such as sending DMCA takedown requests, although these are rare. The tactics below are the most common for negative SEO.
NOTE: The DMCA is a US copyright law that provides remedies for online service providers in the event of copyright infringement. Google has a special form for this.
It is important to emphasize that the very concept of negative SEO is debatable.
Why negative SEO attacks can be difficult to detect and verify
Detecting and proving a negative SEO attack is tricky, especially if a site's backlink profile already contained a ton of toxic links and/or the content was poor.
Very often, webmasters believe that they are victims of a 1000 mobile database negative SEO attack. However, they do not take into account other conditions that could cause a drop in rankings, for example:
An update to Google's algorithms/Algorithm core update.
Being banned by Google's filtering algorithm.
Sometimes, these drops are mistaken for negative SEO. Marie Haynes , SEO Consultant at MarieHaynes.com, had this to say on the subject:
We have had many clients who have firmly believed that they have suffered ranking drops due to unnatural links from competitors to their site. In almost all cases, we have been able to find other plausible explanations for the ranking drops.
Which means it's hard to draw quick conclusions about why your rankings are dropping.
To avoid a potential impact from algorithm updates and algorithm filtering, you should make sure to adapt the quality of your content according to Google's guidelines . And also, take care of your backlink profile.
Auditing your backlinks is very important, as you may have a backlink profile that Google's filtering may consider spammy (containing unnatural links). You can learn more about how to approach algorithmic filtering from the experts interviewed on our blog .
NOTE: The DMCA is a US copyright law that provides remedies for online service providers in the event of copyright infringement. Google has a special form for this.
It is important to emphasize that the very concept of negative SEO is debatable.
Why negative SEO attacks can be difficult to detect and verify
Detecting and proving a negative SEO attack is tricky, especially if a site's backlink profile already contained a ton of toxic links and/or the content was poor.
Very often, webmasters believe that they are victims of a 1000 mobile database negative SEO attack. However, they do not take into account other conditions that could cause a drop in rankings, for example:
An update to Google's algorithms/Algorithm core update.
Being banned by Google's filtering algorithm.
Sometimes, these drops are mistaken for negative SEO. Marie Haynes , SEO Consultant at MarieHaynes.com, had this to say on the subject:
We have had many clients who have firmly believed that they have suffered ranking drops due to unnatural links from competitors to their site. In almost all cases, we have been able to find other plausible explanations for the ranking drops.
Which means it's hard to draw quick conclusions about why your rankings are dropping.
To avoid a potential impact from algorithm updates and algorithm filtering, you should make sure to adapt the quality of your content according to Google's guidelines . And also, take care of your backlink profile.
Auditing your backlinks is very important, as you may have a backlink profile that Google's filtering may consider spammy (containing unnatural links). You can learn more about how to approach algorithmic filtering from the experts interviewed on our blog .