Why the effectiveness of negative SEO is debatable
Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2024 4:43 am
Which means it's hard to draw quick conclusions about why your rankings are dropping.
To avoid a potential impact from algorithm updates and algorithm filtering, you should make sure to adapt the quality of your content according to Google's guidelines . And also, take care of your backlink profile.
Auditing your backlinks is very important, as you may have a backlink profile that Google's filtering may consider spammy (containing unnatural links). You can learn more about how to approach algorithmic filtering from the experts interviewed on our blog .
Some webmasters lose sight of these factors and simply consider their website to have phone code philippines suffered a negative SEO attack. As John Mueller states:
Typically, the cases where I see something related to negative SEO are those where you would manually look and think, well, it looks like someone has built these links in the past. And it's not really a competitor but an SEO who has been working for the company.
Therefore, your site content should always be optimized, engaging and user-oriented. Also, your backlink profile should be kept as clean and trustworthy as possible.
Google doubts that negative SEO, especially intentional bad backlink generation, is an effective practice.
Tweet from Google's John Mu
Click to view the Twitter thread.
So, is an effective negative SEO attack unlikely?
The answer is, it depends.
Google is very good at distinguishing between backlinks you've created and toxic links that appear outside of the results. However, it can be easier to sabotage a website that has little content and a poorly maintained backlink profile. The attacker will simply add fuel to the fire.
At the same time, a quality website can also suffer a negative SEO attack, but for the attacker, it will require more time. The attack must be well designed and carried out intelligently to be truly effective.
Marie Haynes explains it like this:
To avoid a potential impact from algorithm updates and algorithm filtering, you should make sure to adapt the quality of your content according to Google's guidelines . And also, take care of your backlink profile.
Auditing your backlinks is very important, as you may have a backlink profile that Google's filtering may consider spammy (containing unnatural links). You can learn more about how to approach algorithmic filtering from the experts interviewed on our blog .
Some webmasters lose sight of these factors and simply consider their website to have phone code philippines suffered a negative SEO attack. As John Mueller states:
Typically, the cases where I see something related to negative SEO are those where you would manually look and think, well, it looks like someone has built these links in the past. And it's not really a competitor but an SEO who has been working for the company.
Therefore, your site content should always be optimized, engaging and user-oriented. Also, your backlink profile should be kept as clean and trustworthy as possible.
Google doubts that negative SEO, especially intentional bad backlink generation, is an effective practice.
Tweet from Google's John Mu
Click to view the Twitter thread.
So, is an effective negative SEO attack unlikely?
The answer is, it depends.
Google is very good at distinguishing between backlinks you've created and toxic links that appear outside of the results. However, it can be easier to sabotage a website that has little content and a poorly maintained backlink profile. The attacker will simply add fuel to the fire.
At the same time, a quality website can also suffer a negative SEO attack, but for the attacker, it will require more time. The attack must be well designed and carried out intelligently to be truly effective.
Marie Haynes explains it like this: