What is Negative SEO?

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This kind of method has been around for so long, people don’t call it Negative SEO back then and it is used to drop page and websites from search results containing false news and offending content that ruins the good reputation of a person, business and organization. Programmers are even more successful in doing this with a simple hacking or just by reporting the site that hosts the offending content, but that could take ages.

Today, Negative SEO is being used to attack people and businesses online with the intent to lower their website’s rankings, popularity and eventually destroys their name. Whatever the reasons are; political, financial or personal reasons, there are people out there who are doing this today, probably right now.

3 Main Reasons Why Negative SEO is Being Used Today

Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM)

It may sound shady, but yes, this is a totally legitimate way on how you can clean your business’ name online, also referred to as Online Reputation Management. Back then, SERM wasn’t widely used but today a lot of businesses are acquiring the aid of SERM specialists due to the increasing amount of virtual attacks. The SERM specialist’s task is to clean up bad rumors and false news against their client over the internet.

SERP Bubbling and Google Bowling

SERP bubbling is the process of lowering a competitor’s website ranking in search result so yours will float up to the top. While Google Bowling is intended to completely remove a page or site from Google’s search results by making Google think that it is spammy. The methods are simple but deadly.

  • Thousands of unnatural backlinks in a short time
  • Backlinks using bad keywords
  • Dropping of links on link farms, adult sites and forums
  • Site hacking and infecting
  • Adsense and Adwords banning
  • Black hat social bookmarking and networking

There are a lot more Negative SEO techniques which I cannot share here, in case you might get the idea of trying them when you get angry.

Senseless Attacks and Racial Discrimination

There are those who are gifted with coding complex programs who use their skills for senseless actions like hacking websites just because they can and even infiltrating a person’s social media account and gather their personal details for the purpose of humiliating them. While other hackers use their skills to target specific ethnicity just for the fun of it.