Negative SEO is a set of activities aimed at lowering a competitor’s rankings in search results. Instead of attempting to improve a site’s search rankings, the aim of negative SEO is to demote a competing site, or in some cases have it completely removed from search.

But Negative SEO is not the be-all-end-all explanation for any site’s sudden drop in ranking. In fact, it might be tempting – and hence unfruitful – to blame a ranking nosedive on Negative SEO. Seemingly spammy links showing up in backlink profiles is not necessarily the work of your competitors. SEO companies might promise they will give a site “White hat links” or links that are within the Google guidelines, but in reality outsource the job to a cheap link building company that creates spammy bookmarks, blog comments, and forum signatures. Thus it is important to be able to determine if a credible negative SEO campaign is underfoot or other plausible explanations are present.

IS NEGATIVE SEO A CREDIBLE THREAT?

Ever since the release of Penguin Algorithm Update, Google deals with harsh penalties for websites that use black hat SEO techniques. A malicious party (say, your closest competitor) can use those techniques on your site just to try and get you penalized. Google is quite adamant that true, effective negative SEO is very rare. Prior to January of 2003, Google had a page on their site that said the following, “There is nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index” before slyly changing the wording to “There is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking….”, because negative SEO via link building is a possibility. After all, how can Google tell who built all those spammy links, or duplicated content across hundreds of domains?
The answer is that — if the attack is sophisticated enough — they can’t.
So yes, negative SEO can work.
(Although Penguin Algorithm’s launch in 2012 is a step in curbing such cases).

HOW TO DETERMINE IF YOU WERE AFFECTED BY NEGATIVE SEO

1. Search Traffic sees a sudden drop
If the aim of negative SEO is to reduce your search traffic, then clearly for an attack to be considered successful it has to do just that. So if you notice a sudden drop in your search traffic then — assuming you haven’t been up to anything dodgy yourself — it could be a sign of negative SEO.

2. Manual Penalty Notification
If you receive a notice from Google declaring you to be in violation of their guidelines for having ‘artificial or unnatural pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank’ despite not indulging in black hat techniques yourself, you have been served a Manual Google Penalty as a result of negative SEO.

3. Individual Keyword Rankings see a steep drop
This is useful for spotting more granular negative SEO attacks against individual pages or keywords. If one particular keyword has been successfully pushed out the SERPs then you might not immediately spot this when looking at overall site traffic. So make sure you track your most important keywords.

Here is the type of link that you can commonly see when someone is trying to attack you with negative links:

• Links from foreign forums
• A huge number of links from sites with TLDs of .ru, .cz, .cn, .pl, .ro, .bg, .biz, .com.ar, .com.br and .info. Not all of those links are going to be unnatural, but if you are suddenly getting an influx of links from Russian sites, it could be a sign of an attack.
• A large number of links from complete nonsense blog posts
• Lots of keyword-anchored links from multiple sources. (I’d like to reiterate that receiving one sitewide link from a questionable source is not a sign of negative SEO, even if you are suddenly seeing thousands of links coming from that site.)
• An influx of links from bad neighborhoods such as porn sites, gambling sites, payday loan sites, etc.

CONCLUSION
In general, Negative SEO can be costly, takes a lot of effort and is highly risky. The return, on the other hand, isn’t even guaranteed and while it might work, it’s quite easy to fix once the target realizes what is happening. In short – Negative SEO is a high risk, low reward activity. Unless there’s a very compelling reason, it is quite unlikely for anyone to attempt on doing it.

The most likely websites to be targeted for SEO are those in highly-competitive, high-money fields – gambling sites are a common example of this. Sites that are in calmer niches are far less likely to be hit by negative SEO – indeed, anything that happens is more likely to be an accident or a remnant of an old advertising strategy instead of a deliberate attack on you.

That doesn’t mean you should be complacent, though. Constant vigilance is the best way to protect your site and your reputation, so let’s look at what you can do to help protect your site.