The Truth About Negative Search Engine Optimization
In the eventuality that you are like many others whose fate depends on Google when it comes to searches and traffic generated, negative SEO tactics is something you need to really know.
If your pages have started dropping in search results suddenly, there is an excellent possibility that your competitors are trying to suppress the appearance of your webpage in search results and literally hiding your webpage instead of boosting their page rankings.
This underhand tactic is called “negative search engine optimization” or “negative SEO,” an innocent phrase that is potent enough to get your website ranking down and thereby reduce traffic to your site in order to boost theirs. Negative SEO could also occasionally include more underhand tactics like exploiting the algorithms of search engines like Google to cover a competitor with other results so that the traffic to the competitor site goes down considerably and eventually sublimates into nothing.
All it takes is a clear idea of how the rules work. As they say, with knowledge comes power – the power to use the knowledge constructively or destructively.
Google primarily uses the number of link backs to decide a site’s ranking in search results. But then, obviously, it makes it all the more easier for SEOs to generate gazillion links to their site from elsewhere and increase its ranking at the click of a button. The search engines in repose came up with the punishment of condemning such sites which artificially boost their rankings to anonymity by sending their links to the unseen pages of the search results.
But then again, by framing your website as a cheater, the competitors can successfully push you to Google hell and thereby achieve their rankings in search results. It works exactly like framing does for any other crime. They set you up by linking to you and then you get caught!
Though the practice raises many ethical questions, many SEOs have been known to follow it while others prefer to remain tight lipped about its existence. It has always been a grey area when SEOs indulge in negative SEO tactics for their clients. The deals made are of course confidential. Sometimes, it is corporate companies against competitors and at other times, its people wanting to hide unflattering details cropping up in search results. Either ways, Search Engine Optimization is a lethal tool indeed. To use it for good or to use it for bad is after all a matter of perspective.
