If you are in business, it is a good idea to know what Negative SEO is.
Negative SEO is a very real issue and your business can lose business as a result of it. It is where someone without ethics (or an unethical SEO or marketing agency, freelancer, etc) decides to do things online to make your business look bad, especially when potential new customers search Google (or Bing, or DuckDuckGo, and/or other Search Engines).
Sometimes it is not an agency or freelancer who does this. Sometimes it is also an unhappy ex-employee, or competitor who hires someone online (usually based in a country like India … but not always).
[Note: If you hire a SEO businesses/company’s to do SEO work for your business, make sure you vett them fully and make sure they are NOT doing ‘negative SEO’ to YOUR competitors. There are some very nasty (terrible/ cruel/ unethical/ etc) SEO businesses who will do this.]
Negative SEO is a nasty sabotage tactic to deter people/ turn people off from wanting to do business with your business. As an example: Imagine if nasty ‘adult content’ photos get added (hacked) into your Google Business profile. Do you think potential customers who see this will want to do business with you? There are also MANY other ways negative SEO can be done.
[Note: this is a known negative SEO activity. I actually saw this on an Accountants Google Business Profile years ago when they were asking us to work for them. I reported this to them straight away. Turned out they didn’t even know the Google Business Profile existed. It was created by an ex-employee. We helped them gain ownership of the profile and get the nasty images removed.]
A bit of information about Negative SEO is here in an article titled: What is Negative SEO.
There are a few simple things you can check regularly to find out if Negative SEO has been done to your business:
- Check your Google Business Profile to make sure it has not been hacked. Amongst things, check that ‘adult content’ images have not been added to it. [Note: ‘Google Business Profile’ used to be called ‘Google My Business.’]
- Check the content in your website; look for words that have been changed, typos that have been added, hyperlinks that go to websites you did not want them going to, etc. Look for anything that may indicate someone has hacked your website.
- Look at the reviews on your Google Business Profile regularly. If any negative reviews have been added, especially by people you are 100% positive have never been customers, you will need to do something about them. Here is a short article that explains what to do.
- Similarly, check for any negative reviews on your Facebook Business Page… and anywhere else online where people can write reviews about your business (eg. TrueLocal)
- Also, check your backlink profile. We don’t expect you to know what this is, unless you are involved in SEO. Contact us and we can do a website backlink profile check for you. You can also learn a bit more about ‘link bombing‘ and a few other negative SEO backlink tactics here. Remember: Anyone can perform any of these attacks at your website at any time. Regularly checking your backlink profile is important!
When we do SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) work for our clients, one of the many things we do is check for any Negative SEO. We check this regularly. Most businesses have a SEO expert check and monitor for any ‘negative SEO’ every 3 – 5 weeks.