A How question

How does an SEO company handle negative SEO attacks?

3 min read Cites 2 sources

Calmly, and with evidence before action. Negative SEO means a third party trying to harm your search visibility: pointing spammy links at your site, copying your content elsewhere, breaking into the site to add their own pages, or posting fake reviews. A careful company watches for each, confirms that a real problem lines up in time and pattern with a real change in your results before calling it an attack, and then uses the channel that fits: no action, or disavowing only in the cases Google describes, for links; removal requests for copied content; security repair for hacking; platform reports for fake reviews. It does not sell fear.

A sudden wave of low-quality links is the form people worry about first. Google’s documentation on disavowing links says it works to make sure that actions on third-party sites do not harm a website, that most sites do not need the disavow tool, and that it is meant for sites with many spammy links that have caused, or are likely to cause, a manual action. A company should monitor new links in Search Console’s Links report, look for a manual action notice, and treat disavowing as a careful last step, because disavowing good links by mistake does harm of its own.

Copied content

When someone copies your pages and republishes them, the remedy runs through the host and through Google’s legal removal process for copyright, not through SEO tricks. Valid requests have an effect beyond the copied pages: Google’s spam policies state that “When we receive a significant volume of valid copyright removal requests involving a given site, we are able to use that to demote other content from the site in our results.” The word that matters is valid: requests need to be accurate, and a company should help you document your original publication.

Hacking

Some attacks are not about links at all. The same policies define hacked content as “any content placed on a site without permission, due to vulnerabilities in a site’s security”, such as injected code or new spam pages. Search Console’s security issues reporting, regular checks of the site’s pages and code, and prompt updates to the platform and plugins are the defense; if a site is hacked, cleanup and security repair come before anything else.

Fake reviews and false reports

Fake reviews belong with the platform where they appear, reported with the details the platform asks for, and false complaints against your site are answered with documentation. These are matters of record keeping and reporting rather than SEO.

Telling monitoring from alarm

Expect the company to explain what Google says about links from third parties, show you what it monitors and how often, and require a clear match between a suspected attack and a change in your results before recommending action. A company that leads with alarm and sells protection against an unexamined threat is asking you to pay for reassurance rather than for work.

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