What is Negative SEO?

[jerryperes]

What is Negative SEO?

Who do not follow the Google rules and policies that is called negative seo, or you can say black hat seo.

[budapestbabess]

Negative SEO is harmful activity for website...... We should avoid this... It is part of Black hat seo..

[salman gee]

Negative SEO is a controversial topic in the SEO space. You hear about it a lot, but does it happen a lot? How easy is it to ruin a competitor's rankings, really? Should you be worried? How do you know if someone is trying to knock you out of SERPs with negative SEO? Is there anything you can do to stay safe?

In this article, I'll do my best to shed some light on the matter and answer these questions. But before we start…

What is negative SEO, really?
Negative SEO is a set of activities aimed at decreasing a competitor's site rankings in search engines' results. These activities may include knowingly building spammy, unnatural links to the site, content scraping, and even hacking the site. We'll look at the different kinds of negative SEO in a moment.

A bit of backstory
From day one, Google used to do their best to identify unnatural links when evaluating web pages' authority. Originally, links Google thought to be spammy were simply ignored - they did not pass any PageRank to the page they linked to. In response, SEOs would build and buy thousands (or sometimes millions) of links; those that passed equity were great, and the ones that didn't… simply didn't, without harming the site.

In April 2012, Google launched the Penguin update, meaning that for the first time, they would be taking strong punitive action against sites with manipulative links. This, of course, helped Google provide better, fairer search results. But it also gave birth to negative SEO through spammy link building, as you can see from Google Trends below.