Google Says Negative SEO Doesn’t Really Work

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has long supported businesses in driving organic traffic. However, alongside its benefits, there’s also a darker side known as negative SEO. In this blog, an SEO expert in India explains what negative SEO is and why it often fails to make an impact.

What is a Negative SEO?

In order to lower their rating on the search engine result page, businesses often employ negative SEO that involves a variety of illegal activities.

These include creating low-quality backlinks to a competitor’s website and hacking the competitor’s site to alter the content to harm ranking. It is also done by leaking the site data over the webpage and by posting fake reviews on competitors’ sites.

How does Google Combat with Negative SEO?

Google algorithms are smartly designed to detect such illegal practices, because of which negative SEO doesn’t work.

• Google algorithms are well-equipped to detect such fake links. These algorithms are designed meticulously to find such spammed links and stop them from hampering the ranking of the targeted website.

• These algorithms are always improvised and updated to be more precise and accurate to detect such anomalies.

• Google’s Gary Illyes has always mentioned that Google continuously updates its algorithms to make them efficient enough to detect any backlinks that are obtained through malpractices.

• Other than the algorithm part Google makes use of the Disavow tool which is quite useful for the owners of the site.

• This tool helps the site owner to inform Google about those links that seem damaging. Google then instructs the search engine to ignore such links while ranking that particular site or page.

• Already the Google algorithms are well built to distinguish between original and artificial backlinks. The Disavow tool adds an extra layer of protection for the sites.

• The constant effort from Google to update the algorithms has proven beneficial in filtering such links generated by illegal practices.

• Even if negative SEO had some impact on the targeted site the next algorithm update neutralizes this impact and restores the ranking accordingly.

• Google ensures that a site’s ranking is not damaged by such artificially generated links as Google’s search team keeps on monitoring the sites.

• Google makes sure the pages rank well based on their quality content. Using negative SEO, the imposters modify the content to make it look like low-quality content.

• Google has well trained algorithm that focuses on such malpractice while scanning through the pages.

• These algorithms effectively scan and identify such duplicated content to filter out the primary ones from such altered ones.

• This is the major reason why content scraping fails in negative SEO.

• There are SEO communities where site owner helps each other by informing Google about any suspected negative SEO.

• These collaborations help Google in a smooth investigation of such negative SEO and protect the site.
  

How can Site Owners Protect Their Site from Negative SEO?

Google is complying with its duty of protecting your site. As a site owner, you are equally responsible for working along with Google to protect your site from negative SEO.

It is very important to keep a check on your backlinks regularly. If you identify any such low-quality backlinks immediately report it to Google.

Always make sure the content you publish is of high quality, if you notice any alternative or duplicate text make sure to inform the same to Google and make use of tools like Google Search Console.

By obliging to these actions, you would be able to protect your site from negative SEO as well as adhere to Google’s SEO practice for better ranking on the search engine result page.

Conclusion

Google works hard to keep your website safe from negative SEO. A reliable ORM company in India can also help protect your online presence. Google updates its system often to catch harmful activities, and tools like Disavow add extra safety. But as a website owner, you should also check your site regularly and do audits to spot any issues early.