Defending Against Black Hat and Negative SEO Tactics
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Even if you don’t engage in black hat SEO tactics, you may be affected by them. Black hat SEO can be used to maintain a position at the top of the search engine results pages that isn’t really deserved based on the site’s content. Or it can be used to attack competitors, dragging down a rival’s site. It’s enough to make many white hat SEOs and site owners furious.
The good news is that most black hat SEOs are too busy with all of their own sites to directly attack their competitors’ sites. When asked about blackhat SEO tactics, dzine, a regular poster to the SEO Chat forums for the past two years, said that proper black hat SEOs “can’t be [asked] to (willingly) lower competitors’ ranks. They just churn out website after website.”
Don’t assume, though, that it’s never done simply because it’s difficult. There’s even a term for it: negative SEO. The topic was covered by Forbes a few months ago. The article quotes Matt Cutts' reaction to a specific form of negative SEO. “I won’t go out on a limb and say it’s impossible,” he said. “But Google bowling is much more inviting as an idea than it is in practice.”
So Matt Cutts won’t say it’s impossible. Does that mean that you need to worry? I can certainly understand why you might worry if your site held a good position in the SERPs and is now disappearing from the search engines. But that’s not immediate evidence of enemy action.
The first thing you should do is find out whether this slide in the SERPs is something that you’re doing to yourself. As Diane Aull explained in an article on Search Engine Guide, “There are too many potential ‘oopsies’ you could be committing to mention them all: robots.txt that excludes the spiders, unspiderable JS/AJAX navigation, all-Flash no-content splash page, nothing but low-quality links, crappy content with no keywords, same title tag used throughout site, etc.”
You can check the Google Webmaster Guidelines for help when you’re trying to figure out whether that drop in the SERPs might be due to an unintentional violation. If you’ve determined that the drop wasn’t due to something you did (or failed to do), you have a number of options. Before I get to those, however, I’m going to discuss some of the destructive tactics that practitioners of negative SEO might engage in to harm a site’s search engine ranking.
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