Negative SEO
Negative SEO is an attempt to hurt a competitor's search rankings, for example by pointing spammy links at their site or copying their content.
Negative SEO is an attempt to push someone else's site down the search results. Instead of improving their own pages, the attacker tries to make a competitor look bad to search engines. It worries many site owners, and it succeeds far less often than they fear.
What it looks like
The most common form is spam links: thousands of links from low-quality sites, often with keywords about gambling or pills, pointed at the target. The hope is that search engines will think the target bought them. Other forms include copying a site's pages across many domains, posting fake reviews, and, at the extreme, hacking a site to add spam or a noindex rule.
For example, Harrow & Pine checks its link profile and finds 2,000 new links in a week from foreign-language sites it's never heard of, all with the anchor text "cheap furniture." Its rankings haven't moved. That's what most negative SEO attempts look like: alarming in a report, and quiet in the results.
What to do
Google says that in most cases it can work out which links to trust without your help. Its disavow tool is for when you have many spam links and a manual action, or reason to expect one. Before reaching for it:
- Check Search Console for a manual action or a security warning.
- Make sure your own site hasn't been changed: no new pages you didn't make, no noindex you didn't add, no new robots.txt rules.
- Report fake reviews to the platform that hosts them.
The AI search version
AI answers have their own kind of attack: planting false claims about a brand on pages the platforms read, hoping the answers repeat them. It's harder to dismiss than spam links, because the platforms read words, and a false claim on a well-read page can end up in an answer.
AnswerOrbit's Claims checks what the answers say about you against the facts you give us, and shows the sentence and the page behind each contradiction.