Is Negative SEO Real and What Is It?

Buying links from burned networks with exact match anchors. This can bury a whole domain

Since you are already reading this, you probably have at least some knowledge about SEO and why it’s used. Today, we’ll talk about negative SEO and go through the following questions:

What is negative SEO?

Is negative SEO real?

Is negative SEO legal?

Let’s start from the begging and talk about positive SEO or just like everybody knows it - SEO. Figuratively speaking, this would be any tactic that intends to positively impact rankings for a certain URL and its host domain. We hope you’re starting to get the picture…

What is negative SEO?

Quite the opposite of the regular SEO we all know. Every tactic that intents to impact negatively the URL rankings and possibly its host domain can be considered negative SEO. Why do we need this, you may ask? Dealing with the competition, of course.

Is negative SEO real?

Google says it isn’t, but we believe Google is not entirely honest here. We know for sure that over time, Google attempts to keep some tactics from causing much damage. Just think about it. If you’re a webmaster, you probably know and possibly have hurt your website’s ranking accidentally. If you can do this just by accident, imagine what you could do if you had the intent to do it. Examples of negative SEO:

Buying links from burned networks with exact match anchors. This can bury a whole domain.

Sending A LOT of bad neighborhood links.  

Keywords stuffing and spamming on comment sections

Hotlinking competitor’s images

Is negative SEO legal?

Even though it’s less likely to be legal and this practice is not new, Google still denies the existence of it, and most of the practices mentioned above wouldn’t be considered hacking. However, we are not here to give legal advice, and if you are the victim of suspected negative SEO, you should seek your rights.

We hope you found this article interesting, and we’ll keep on investigating the whole negative SEO mystery. See you next time!