Industry Advice
Negative SEO: A shocking, but inevitable epidemic
Have you ever given much thought to negative SEO and what damage this could do to your business? In a nutshell, negative SEO is the opposite of search engine optimisation. Shai Aharony, SEO guru at Reboot Online explains more.
H
ere at Reboot Online a large portion of our workload involves dealing with Google penalty recovery cases. The demand has increased dramatically over the last few years. To date, we have managed over 170 penalty recovery clients. Penalties caused by less than organic SEO practices, ranging from comments spam, forums spam, directory spam, pingback spam, profile spam, hijacked/injected spam and every other type of spam possible.
The common denominator of all this spam was the cause of the penalty. Cheap SEO.
Recently we have started seeing a
different cause for these types of spammy links – negative SEO. Searching around the web also shows a worrying increase in websites offering negative SEO type services. Some quite camouflaged in their intent while others are shamelessly and blatantly advertising it for what it is.
I was still reluctant to believe that in the UK, company owners;
entrepreneurs, family men and women, mums and dads… you and me… would be so easily swayed to this dark corner of the business universe aimed at weakening, disrupting or destroying a competitors business.
Negative SEO exists
There are still people out there that would swear blind that negative SEO is impossible or so negligible that the typical, honest webmaster has nothing to worry about. Letʼs be clear; negative SEO exists and itʼs a growing problem. Especially on weaker, newer or less established sites where the authority of the site has not been established yet. The same authority that would make a negative SEO attack on big brand sites meaningless.
So we know that the services are there to find, and we know that itʼs very possible for a negative SEO campaign to actually work. So, all thatʼs left is the actual will for someone to want to do such an underhand act on a fellow business. Surely, such a service will be
| 28 | June 2017
rejected by the fair traders of this fair land? Well, we decided to put that to the test. We compiled a list of local businesses.
We then chose the ones that have a functioning website and went as far as to check for signs that the site has had some SEO done in the past. This was purely to increase the chances that the person we talk to will understand what it is we are about to offer. At this point, we had 84 contacts. We then sent the below email to all 84 businesses harvested:
Dear… We can get rid of your
competitors that are currently ranking above you on Google.
I have had a quick look at your site and noticed that you have three main competitors above you on the first page of Google.
I am able to offer you a service that will make those sites disappear from the first page of Google results for a period of at least six months resulting in your site being bumped up accordingly in the Google rankings. In some cases, your competitorʼs site will not return and in most cases, they will disappear for much longer than three months. To achieve this, we use a combination of two methods: 1) Establishing thousands of very low quality spammy links from some of the shadiest corners of the internet and… 2) A well-established method of content duplication and distribution that we have developed. This service is guaranteed. We only charge £250 for the service per site and then an extra £150 for any extra sites thereafter. £50 of which is payable on acceptance and the balance is payable only after the sites have been removed from page one of Google. If the site returns to a position above you after less than six months, we will repeat the service completely free of charge.
The results We received a reply from 61 of the businesses – an incredibly high reply rate to what is pretty much an unsolicited email.
● 11 politely rejected the offer. ● 19 wanted more information on the
● Two gave me some well-deserved abuse while rejecting the offer.
Out of the 61 respondents:
● 29 accepted the offer outright and asked for payment details. So, out of the 61 respondents, a massive 48 either took the offer on or were very interested in the offer of sabotaging their competitorʼs websites. Thatʼs an incredibly high 78.6% while only 21.3% declined. Itʼs not the most scientific test out there. For a start, a service such as the one I offered is not realistically possible for that price; especially considering the guarantee I provided. In fact, such a guarantee is, Iʼm pretty sure, impossible to offer at this sort of price point as negative SEO depends on so many factors such as the methods and how authoritative the target site itself is in the eyes of Google at the time of attack. Until Google clearly declares that it is tackling this growing problem, my main suggestion to the majority of webmasters out there is to make the checking of their own link profile a regular job as well as regularly checking Copy Scape for any plagiarism of your content (
copyscape.com). Preferably once a week and if not possible, at least once a month.
service, payment or the guarantee we provide.
www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk
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