Q. On average, how many negative SEO cases do you see annually?
A. I see a lot of image theft/direct links from sites like The Globe. I also see redirects quite often. Canonical links are less frequent, I usually see them about 2-3 times a year.
Q. What is the most challenging negative SEO case you have had to deal with?
A. Negative links combined with spammy content on an ecommerce site. Each new piece of content was stolen and placed on different websites from unclear TLDs.
When visiting the site for the first time, there was a list of products/articles from the original website, as well as snippets of text from the original page. The second retrieval of the site led to a dating site with multiple redirects. As a result, the original page does not appear in search results for the brand name.
It took about 7 months to get rid of this and establish a working solution for the client. Almost every day, we report the stolen content to Google to get the good results back.
Q. How often do webmasters and owners believe they have been victims of negative SEO when in fact their rankings dropped due to a poor backlink profile and poor or unoptimized content?
A: Oh, I see it quite often. I call it negative SEO when negative patterns are intentionally present.
Final considerations
If we look at all the practices associated with negative SEO, we will see that the generation of toxic backlinks (spam), duplicate content and fake reviews have a connection.
All other tactics, in fact, are more like hacks and scams.
Negative SEO can be damaging. The extent of its consequences depends on several preconditions. The only way to protect yourself is to take all necessary precautions so that any attack is blocked. Constantly check your website using different tools to stay up to date with any potential problems that may arise.
I hope this reading has helped you! Let us know in the comments if you have ever experienced a negative SEO attack.
*This article has been written by the SEMrush team and adapted to Spanish from its original English version