What is most common negative SEO tactic?

 

·         The most common method I see these days is building low-quality, spammy backlinks. Building a ton of low-quality links to a competing site is also one of the most unsophisticated forms of negative SEO, which is good news, as it means it has less of an effect on our website.

 

·         However, as we want to become the best SEO as possible, it's always good practice to take action when you see an attack like this.

 

·         Whether those spammy links come from cheap Fiverr gigs, ScrapeBox comment spam, or a link network, the result is the same, a sudden influx of dodgy links pointing to our site.

 

·         So how spam links can harm your site. There are two approaches to link spam when it comes to negative SEO. The first is what we call the volume approach.

 

·         So this is blasting thousands upon thousands of low-quality links at your website and the second is over-optimized anchor text.

 

·         So as we covered in the link-building section of this course, it's extremely important we get the anchor text optimized and go for a natural approach.

 

·         You don't want too many anchors of any anchor type. This strategy plays on that and over-optimizes you for certain anchor text types.

 

·         Our competitor can also send loads of irrelevant anchor text as well to try and confuse Google to what your website is about. However, both of these tactics are very easy to spot.

 

·         Let's he'd over to SEMrush, and I'll show you exactly how we can identify both these types of link spam. So I'm now over on SEMrush, and I've searched for the website blessedcbd.co.uk.

 

·         So this is the website we're going to be looking at in detail when it comes to negative SEO and the reason I picked this website in particular is because I was actually doing some keyword research a few weeks ago, and whilst carrying out my keyword research.

 

·         I actually noticed that this website is indeed suffering from a negative SEO attack. Now, just to confirm, this isn't my website.

 

·         I have no affiliation with this website whatsoever. I'm simply just going to be using it as an example to showcase how you can identify a negative SEO attack.

 

·         So if we go back over to SEMrush and make sure we carry out a search for the website, ensure we have the right database selected.

 

·         So as this website is a .co.uk, I've gone and clicked the UK database.

·         Now, the easiest way to identify a negative SEO attack is to check the referring domains.

 

 

 

 

Now, it's really important to note as well that if your blog post has gone viral, for example:

 

·         Then this can also lead to a massive influx of backlinks. However, if you haven't had any blog posts go viral in the last few months, and then it's very likely that the massive influx of links your website is getting is going to be from a negative SEO attack.

 

·         So now we've covered the first method, it's time to cover the second most common negative SEO attack, which is over-optimized anchor text or irrelevant anchor text.

 

·         So this is essentially where websites link to you, and they all use the same anchor text which you're trying to target, which maybe is your target match keyword.

 

·         It could be using anchor text which is completely irrelevant to your website.

 

·         So the main aim here is to try to throw Google off and confuse Google with what your website is actually about. So we can very easily identify this using SEMrush.