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This is Grumpy SEO Guy. Episode 141, Negative SEO.

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You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy, and I'm sharing with you the strategies that have helped me successfully run my SEO agency for the last 14 years. In this podcast, I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience, discussing tips and strategies, and trying to help you cut through the confusion that permeates this industry. If you listen to this podcast, you will know more about SEO than 99% of people on the planet. Ready? Let's get started.

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I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy. Let me tell you why I'm grumpy today. I'm grumpy today because a lot of people don't understand negative SEO. So today, that's what we're going to talk about. But first, let's refresh a couple things. You can email me. Hello, grumpyseoguy.com if you like the podcast, please subscribe. If you want to support the podcast, you can do so@patreon.com Grumpy SEO Guy. If you have a question for the Grumpy SEO Guy community, you can post it at Reddit.com r Grumpy SEOguy and if you have a complicated question and you'd like to set up a zoom advisory call, you can do so by emailing me and we can talk about getting that planned. Okay, now let's talk about negative SEO.

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But before we do that, my lawyer tells me that I have to say this right now. A quick disclaimer before we get started. Everything I say here is based on my experience and opinion from 14 years in the industry. I don't officially know how Google or any other search engines work. Everything I say here is hypothetical. And based on my experience, this podcast does not constitute advice or services. What worked for me may or may not work for you. Okay, back to the show.

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So really quickly, because probably most of you have heard of this, but maybe not negative SEO. And I am not telling you to do this. Okay? I'm just explaining it. Okay. I'm just describing it. Okay? Negative SEO is when you build bad backlinks to a competitor to get them a penalty. Okay? Again, you should probably try to keep from doing this. Just focus on good SEO for your own site. Now, there's a couple things that I want to say about negative SEO. And the first one is a lot of people say that it's not A real thing that's wrong. We've had at least one client successfully get negative SEO'd. And I think I mentioned that in one of the early episodes where we were talking about penalties. I might talk a little bit more about that in this episode. Anyway, so it is, it is a real thing. But here's the thing, it's not always successful. So when people have maybe seen attempts or maybe tried it themselves and it didn't work, they're like, oh, it doesn't work. Maybe you just did it wrong. So anyways, the other reason I'm making this episode is because we got an email not too long ago from a long term advisory client. And he said somebody was negative seoing them. And so I was like, oh my gosh, we should probably, you know, figure out what's going on with this. So by the way, this, this person is a, is a long term advisory client. We haven't, we haven't provided them any backlinks, but they've been, you know, occasionally booking a zoom advisory call and following the suggestions and the advice on the podcast, and they're, they're having a lot of success. So naturally he was a little bit concerned when he saw what looked like negative SEO. So let me kind of explain what we saw and what you might find if you, if somebody's negative SEO ing you and like, kind of what I told him. And I also kind of want to share a little bit more about how negative SEO works. So let's actually do that first. So negative SEO is designed to do kind of two things to a website, right? Number one, it's supposed to. And this isn't. There's no, like, preference for these. Okay. Number one, it's supposed to get your website associated with bad quality websites. Okay, you guys, remember when you talk about building backlinks, one of the things we have a whole, a whole guide you're supposed to follow. Okay, for good backlinks versus bad backlinks. Right. There's at least two episodes that describe good backlinks versus bad backlinks. I'll put links in the description. But ultimately you're looking for a certain quality of website. And so, like, negative SEO is the opposite of that. You're getting backlinks from bad quality websites. But there's another thing that negative SEO also does. Negative SEO provides you relevancy for phrases that you do not want to be part of your website and that have nothing to do with your company. Okay, so let me give you an obvious example. One of the most popular types of Negative SEO involves building a lot of low quality backlinks and using adult terms. Okay, I'm not going to say them, but whatever you're, whatever you're, whatever you're visualizing. Okay. In your mind, that's probably the correct terms that people are using in the backlinks. Okay? Now if your business has literally nothing to do with those terms, it wouldn't make any sense that you would get backlinks having those terms, would it? Of course not. What is the biggest thing I always ask you in this podcast? Does this make sense or would this ever organically happen? Right. If you have a business that has nothing to do with adult, and you start getting hundreds or thousands of adults backlinks, do you think that looks natural? No, of course not. It associates your website with or it builds relevancy for your website for a term that you're, that you shouldn't be relevant for. Okay. Anyways, so that's, that's how it works. So it's kind of the opposite of getting good quality backlinks. Right? Good quality backlinks provide authority because they meet the criteria. In our two part episode about backlink quality. Right. Which again, I'll put a link in the description. So good backlinks do one thing, bad backlinks do another thing. But. So it's kind of difficult though, because some people are going to say, well, spammy backlinks just get ignored by the search engines, don't they? Well, not always, because negative SEO can be effective. Now again, I'm not saying that it's always effective. In fact, I would say it is usually ineffective. Okay. We've seen a lot more negative SEO attempts than we've seen negative SEO victories, I guess. I don't know, whatever. But anyways, so it's definitely a thing. But it doesn't always work. And because it doesn't always work or because people don't want to think that backlinks can hurt you. So it's kind of like, you know, the people that don't like, agree that backlinks are a ranking factor that talk about content all the time and they just won't even mention backlinks because they don't want to visualize a scenario where backlinks matter. Right. Because that would damage their entire concept of how they think SEO works. Right? So it's like, oh no, backlinks don't matter. It's all about content, blah, blah, blah. And then you like show, you know, you show support for the fact that good quality backlinks do, in fact, get you to the top of the search engines, right? Assuming everything else is. Is the way it's supposed to be, right? And so then they, like, won't. They're just like, no, no, it's wrong. Buy my content. Right? So, like, negative SEO is kind of the same way. People don't want to think that, like, lower quality. I don't want to say lower quality. Like a specific type of backlink can hurt you, but it's, It's. It's mostly just you're. You're creating relevancy for something that you shouldn't and you're making it look like it's very spammy SEO or which can get a website flagged. I'm going to get off of this, like, topic now because people are. I can hear people like, you're wrong. It's not a real thing. It doesn't work. Okay, whatever. Anyways, look, so. But that's how it works. That's the reason it's supposed to work. And it's very hard to do because, like, if you have a really authoritative website, think how much spam it would take to bring down a really authoritative website. Right? I'm not saying it's impossible. We had a client that was doing very, very well in a very competitive industry who got negative SEO'd, and it was a giant mess. But anyways, it works. It's just you're probably not doing it right. And don't worry about it because you probably won't need to know how to do it anyway, so. And you shouldn't do it. Just do good SEO on your own website, right? Like, come on. Anyways, but I want you to be aware of the fact so that, like, in a case where you see it happening to your website, you realize what's going on. Anyway, what was I gonna say? Right? So we talked about what it is. We talked about why people do it. Well, if we didn't, they do it because they want to bring down their competition, right? Instead of, instead of, instead of raising their own website, they want to bring down their competition. Okay? So anyways, whatever. So that's why they do it. We talked about how they do it. They do it by building spammy backlinks using. Using anchor text that probably shouldn't be associated with your website. Okay? And I think that's everything so far. Okay, so anyway, this person that I was talking to, so we got on Zoom and we were looking at their backlinks and they had. I think it was, it was either hundreds or thousands. I can't Remember, it might have been. I think it was over a thousand. They had over a thousand backlinks with adult terms in the backlinks. So, again, whatever you're picturing is probably the correct terms that were being used. Okay. I can't say them in the podcast though. I probably can't say them in the podcast anyway. And there's like thousands of them, right? So this is a legit business. Okay? They've been doing good SEO for at least, like, the two years we've been working with them. And all of a sudden they get like. I think it was. I think it was over a thousand. I'm gonna say thousands. They get thousands of like, adult backlinks, right? That has literally nothing to do with their business. Okay, so the attacker was trying to connect their website, in the search engines viewpoint, to an adult industry. Okay? But for this particular website, at least from the time that it started to the time we got on Zoom, nothing bad had happened. Their rank was still good. They were still in position two and position one, I think. I think, honestly was a couple weeks ago. I'm trying to remember. I think they were in. I think they were going back and forth between position one and position two. Like, they were ranking very nicely. There's literally no problem. You. It was an. It didn't work. The negative SEO didn't work, so it didn't succeed. So, like, it wasn't a problem. And I was just like, you know what, Just ignore this. This is just some, like, knucklehead who is bitter because you're outranking him. So just don't worry about it. Nothing bad is going to happen. And I also want to make a comment here that sometimes, depending on the tool that you use to check your backlinks, you might see some things that are labeled as spam. Right? That doesn't necessarily have anything to do with negative se. So when you see spammy backlinks. And we have another. I did another topic on this. I'll put a link in the notes. But listen, you might see like, it'll be like spam, spam. Or perhaps you will see these. There's a marketing campaign going on right now where people are trying to sell you domains and they're doing it by spamming your website with backlinks that talk about how you can buy authoritative domains in the backlink. Right? They're obvious spam. It happens to pretty much all the websites on the Internet. You can ignore those. They're not going to hurt you. That's not negative SEO. That's just advertising. Okay, so anyway, look, negative SEO is obvious because when you see it, you can tell that the backlinks are deliberately trying to. To. To make your. Make your website seem like it is in an industry that it is not. Okay? They're trying to make you seem like you're in a field that you are not. So anyways, that's kind of what it looks like. I can't tell you the terms that were used, but you get the point anyways. Basically ignore it. You can. You can basically ignore it if you see it happening to you. If it works, your rank will drop because you'll get a penalty. Okay, so like, and you know, you know what penalties, what happens when you get a penalty? Because you listen to that episode, right? And I'll put a link to that one in the description too. Actually, there were a few episodes. Actually, there were a couple episodes where we talk about penalties and SERP charts and everything. Anyway, but the point is, you might freak out a little bit if somebody's negative SEOing you, but you're probably gonna be good because probably it's not gonna work. Probably. It did work. Like I said, it worked one time. So anyways, I hope this makes sense. Let me know if you have any questions and let me know what you want me to talk about in the future.