Negative SEO.

Negative SEO refers to attempts by malicious actors to harm a competitor's organic search rankings using tactics that violate Google's guidelines — typically building large volumes of low-quality, spammy backlinks to the target site, duplicating the site's content at scale, or fabricating fake reviews to trigger a manual penalty.

Common Negative SEO Tactics

Spammy link attacks: pointing thousands of links from low-quality sites (gambling, adult, foreign-language spam sites) at the target. Content scraping: copying and republishing target content across hundreds of sites, sometimes faster than the original, to confuse Google about the origin. Fake reviews: filing fake negative reviews on Google Business Profile to suppress local rankings. Crawling attacks: hammering a site with bots to exhaust server resources.

Detecting Negative SEO

Signs include: sudden spikes in low-quality backlinks in Ahrefs or Search Console, unusual increases in crawl errors, duplicate content alerts, or a Google manual action notification. Google Search Console's 'Links' report and third-party tools (Ahrefs, Semrush backlink monitors) with alert settings catch attacks early.

Google's Resilience

Google's algorithms are designed to ignore most spammy links rather than penalise the target site — recognising that sites cannot control who links to them. In practice, large-scale link attacks are more likely to be algorithmically ignored than to cause ranking drops. However, monitoring and maintaining a disavow file is still advisable for sites in competitive verticals.