Negative SEO Attack – What are the Signs?

Q: If we suspect we have been affected by negative SEO reporting can we find out?

Answer:

What is negative SEO? Negative SEO is when a competitor rats you out to Google. How do they do this? First, you need to be doing something that is in violation of the Google terms of service. Usually this will be either an on page violation such as a keyword stuffed doorway page or pages, or an off page violation such as participation in a link scheme.

Almost everyone who engages in search engine optimization is in violation of something! Google has so thoroughly written the rules of the game that almost anything can be construed as a violation. So, now let’s assume you are in violation.

A competitor sees you showing up across searches that matter to them, and they have a savvy search engine optimization firm, so they log into webmaster tools and they issue a complaint.

One or two complaints is not generally sufficient to cause a manual penalty. However if they know what they are doing, and or they have contacts inside of Google, with enough blustering, they can get Google’s attention. Fortunately Google will alert you via webmaster tools that you have been subject to a manual penalty, and they will generally do a pretty nice job of telling you what you need to do to fix it.

The big take away here is to make sure you are subscribed to webmaster tools, and make sure you are receiving alerts from webmaster tools, and or checking it regularly!