Episode 4 – Real Negative SEO

What this episode covers

Hi and thank you for listening to SEO Fight Club. I’m Ted Kubaitis and I have 22 years of web development and SEO experience. I have patented web technologies and started online businesses. I am both an engineer and a marketer. My goal is to help you win your SEO fights. This episode’s FREEBIE! With every episode I love to give something away of high value. This episode’s SEO freebie is my own personal 40 point negative SEO checklist. If you are concerned about negative SEO then this checklist will help you conduct periodic audits for suspicious activity. This free download will save you hours on checking your websites for attacks. You can download the freebie at: http://seofightclub.org/episode4 Negative SEO refers to the practice of using techniques to ruin a competitor’s rankings in search engines, but really just in Google. Most people think of Negative SEO as unwanted spammy backlinks. To put it simply, those people have a failure of imagination. To understand the dozens of tactics of negative SEO you first have to understand its numerous motivations and intentions. Here are some of those intentions: * Get a site banned from search results. * Get a page demoted in the rankings. * Steal a website’s customers. * Steal a website’s content. * Steal a website’s viewers or contributors. * Change the topics a webpage ranks for. * To hurt the reputation of the website. * To hurt the reputation of the author. * To hurt the reputation of a product. * To disrupt a website’s ad revenue. * To squander a website’s ad spend. * To ruin a website’s content or data. * To disrupt the operation of the website. * To cause financial harm to a website. * To cause confusion about products and services or to blur the lines * differentiating them. * To slander or make false claims about a website, business, or person. * To bully, harass, or otherwise intimidate a person, website, or business. I am certain there are more I’m not thinking of. Very quickly people can start to sense how they or people they know have already been hurt by negative SEO. I’m sure you are already sensing the kind of uneasy ground we all stand on now. When a business gets hit by these it can be crippling. It is absolutely devastating when you are hit by multiple of these at the same time. There are an estimated 40 kinds of negative SEO tactics that I know of and the list seems to grow every year as Google adds new things to punish that can be weaponized by negative SEO practitioners. * spammy links * false ratings and reviews (worst product ever) * rating and review spam (this is ok but my product over here is better) * content spam * content theft * GoogleBot interruption * False canonicalization * False authorship * toxic domain redirection * denial of service * crippling the site’s speed * fraudulent DMCA takedown * Cross site scripting * Hacking the site * Keyword bombing posts and comments * Website or Social Identity Theft * Fake complaints * Injecting Malware * Click-spamming ads * CTR and other false signal bots * faking Email spam to get competitor publicly blacklisted * Fake bots that claim to be competitor and behave badly (again to get publicly * blacklisted) * Submitting alternative URLs or hosts to exploit missing canonical tags * Link building a page into a new keyword context * Link building incorrect pages into the keyword context for bad experience * Flooding a web database with bogus data * Posting adult or damaging content * Linking from adult sites or other toxic locations