The Methods Of Negative SEO

We the SEO lover people, always think about boosting out key phrase ranking in the SERP, but how much of us know about negative SEO?? Probably very few of us….

Negative SEO is the tactic to demoralize your core competitor’s key phrase ranking in the search result to boost your own. It reduces a page’s ranking in the search result.

Why do Negative SEO?

This yet to be favorite SEO tactic is mainly done for the following main two reasons:

1. To downgrade your competitor in the search ranking and SERP. This technique is called SERP bubbling. Generally it is done alongside the normal SEO to improve your own site at the same time to dominate your competitor to boost your own ranking.
2. To conceal the news about yourself and also your company. Suppose you have bad reputation over the globe around the web, but as a company owner or as a celebrity or famous person you obviously don’t want to spread those bad things more which can severely damage your reputation. So, you have to downgrade those who are spreading bad things about you and your organization by reducing those particular profiles’s ranking, so that people can’t be much more aware of that. This process is called Online Reputation Management (ORM/SERM).

The Process of Doing Negative SEO

There are a number of ways you can eliminate a page from the search engine rankings. Some of the methods listed are legitimate and good practice, but others are sneaky, immoral and probably illegal. This information is provided so that you may prevent your site being a victim of negative SEO, rather than to condone the practice.
1. Removing aberrant content
This is the easiest method. If an insulting post has been made on a forum, you can call for the moderators to remove the content. In general, forum moderators and blog owners are quite happy to delete potentially damaging posts and comments.

2. Endorse non felonious content - "Insulation"
This involves creating or promoting non harmful pages, for example, if a page contains negative messages about your client, you can create positive message content, and do SEO to promote those pages higher up, and force the bad press down the rankings where it will have less impact.
Similary, you can do this for business competitors. If you sell product A and your competitor sells products A and B, then you can promote another company that just sells product B, which is not in competition with you, but is in competition with the business that you are doing negative SEO on.
This method is sometimes called Google Insulation.

3. Google Bowling
This is a technique designed to remove a site from the SERPs by making google believe the site is spammy. The are two ways this can be done. One is to add links to the site from lots of bad neighbourhoods, link farms and automatically generated spammy pages. If you get thousands of links back to he site in a few days and get them to show up in googles results, this can trigger a spam alert and affect the rankings of the site. The other way it is done is to find a page on your competitors website which has dynamic URLs but has the same content, for example, if they have a page with the url http://mycompetitors.com/index.php?page=11 , then is the url is changed to page=12 but has the same content, then you are vulnerable to google bowling by url manipulation. What is done then is to create hundreds of links with slightly different urls but the same content, post these links liberally around forums, blogs, directories and link farms, and sooner or later google will tag it as black hat.

4. Infect their site
If a site is infected with a virus, then it is flagged up in the SERPs as being potentially dangerous. This can be also achieved by using cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities to create links to pages which display on page content from posted form elements or querystrings - for example, if you have a site with a page like search.asp?keyword=mysearch and in the page itself it says 'there are no results for mysearch' - then the link can be manipulated to search.asp?keyword=. If you then post this link on a webpage, then anyone clicking on it will get the search results page, and where it says 'there are no results for XX' the javascript is inserted into the page content and runs with the same security level as the main page itself. When google picks this link up, it will flag your site as infected and possibly remove it from the search results.

5. Tattling
This involved informing google that a site contravenes its guidelines. Usually this is to report paid-for links (which you youself could set up without the target site's involvement), or grey hat SEO tactics used on the site. Other forms of tattling is to claim copyright theft of content or images.

6. Guilty by Association
This method involves making your own spammy site - the spammier the better - using a similar url to your competitor and if possible use the same domain registrar and hosting services. Copying the metatags and site content of the home page of your target site is also useful. Then you do everything in your power to get the site banned (it's not hard). Once you have done this, you install a 301 redirect to your competitors site and sit back and watch it slide down the rankings linke a pig on a greasy pole! This is especially effective if your black site has the same pages as the target site and you do individual 301 redirects to the target site.

7. False duplicated content
The way this is done is to create a site with the same content as your competitor, but try to get the new content to the site crawled before your competitor. For example, if your competitor changes their home page, you change your honeypot site's homepage to the same content and metatags, then submit a sitemap with just that page on it to google, bing and yahoo site explorer, so that your content is indexed first and your competitor's content is ignored as duplicate content when the search engines get around to indexing them. This is very hard to defend against, and only reporting the site as phishing content can save you here. Canonical urls can also help.

8. Denial of Service Attacks (DOS)
This method of hacking uses several different computers to simultaniously flood the target website with requests so that the volume of traffic blocks up the website's bandwidth and essentially cuts off access to the rest of the world. Distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS) are even more damaging because they use hundreds or even thousands of virus infected zombie PCs all on different IP Addresses to attack the target site.
If a site is unreachable when google tries to crawl it, this has negative consequences for the rankings of the site.

9. Click Fraud
If your competitor has adwords running for their site, you can click on their adverts to use up their budget and affect the number of genuine visitors. Generally google is pretty good at detecting this, so it has limited impact. However, if you set up a team of people and got them all to do 3 or 4 clicks a day, it soon adds up.
Another click mechanism is to get all your friends to click on your site, or the sites just below your competitor. There is some evidence to suggest that the number of clicks affects your rankings.

10. Adsense Banning
If your target site uses google adsense, then you can click on their adverts on their site many times until the adsense account is suspended. Its much easier to suspend someone's adsense account than it is to get it resumed following allogations of click fraud.

11. Black social bookmarking
This method uses social networking sites like twitter and facebook to create lots of bogus accounts, then use these accounts to create spammy links to the target site with phrases like 'viagra', 'porn', 'teens', 'warez', 'crackz', 'gambling' etc. This is an extension of google bowling taking advantage of the new features of google that include real time search of social networking sites.