Negative SEO Is Mostly a Con. Here's What Actually Hurts You

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Somebody is going to tell you your competitor is attacking your SEO and then

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offer to protect you for a monthly fee.

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That's the con.

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But there are real attacks, and they're not the one being sold to you.

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This is SEO Fucking What?

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I'm Nikki, over 30 years doing this, back before it was called SEO.

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I help small business owners make money from their websites.

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Today, I wanna talk about negative SEO, which is the idea that someone

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else can deliberately damage your rankings, and it's one of the most

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effective fear sales in this industry because it does two things at once.

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It explains away a drop that might be your agency's fault, and it

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justifies a new line on an invoice.

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So I'm gonna tell you what's mostly rubbish, and then I'm gonna tell you

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what's real because there are ways that someone can do you harm, and no

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one's selling protection for those.

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Funny that.

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So the one they sell you, the classic negative SEO story goes like this: a

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competitor points thousands of spammy links at your website from dodgy sites.

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Google sees a dirty backlink profile, and your rankings collapse.

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Now, has that ever been possible?

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Yes.

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There was a period, roughly the years either side of 2012, where dumping rubbish

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links on a site could genuinely cause it problems because Google was penalising

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sites for the links pointing at them.

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What changed is that Google stopped doing it that way.

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From around 2016, the link handling moved towards ignoring the rubbish

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rather than punishing the site it points at, for the obvious reason that

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punishing you for something anyone can do to you is a catastrophically

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stupid way to build a search engine.

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If it worked, every competitive search result in the country would be a war

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zone, and no one would ever rank for anything without a security budget.

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Google's own people, John Mueller in particular, have said many times over

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the years that most sites don't need to worry about this, and most sites

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shouldn't touch the disavow tool.

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Which brings me to the disavow tool because this is where the money is.

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The disavow tool still exists.

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It tells Google to ignore links from specific sites, and there's

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an entire cottage industry built on charging you monthly to monitor your

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backlinks and disavow the bad ones.

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So what you need to know, Google already ignores the vast majority of

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that stuff without even being asked, and it's perfectly possible to make

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things worse by disavowing links which were doing you good because

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somebody with a tool and a threshold decided a site looked a bit iffy.

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The only time disavow genuinely belongs in the conversation is if you've got an

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actual manual action for links, usually because somebody bought links on your

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behalf, and you can't get them removed.

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That's usually the only thing you need to use it for.

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So if there's a line on your invoice for backlink monitoring, link auditing,

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or negative SEO protection, and you've never had a manual action,

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ask what it's protecting you from.

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Run it through the questions from a few episodes back.

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Where did Google say this?

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Who tested it?

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Who gets paid if I believe it?

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There is one more thing worth saying.

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If an agency or an SEO consultant like me tells you that a drop was

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caused by a competitor attacking you, that's an extremely convenient

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explanation for someone whose work you're currently questioning.

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It costs them nothing, and it explains everything.

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Go and do the 20-minute check I gave you in the traffic

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episode before you accept it.

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But

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So some attacks are real, and then that's the part that no

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one's selling you a package for.

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What normally happens is that businesses pay for a bodyguard while

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leaving the keys in the front door.

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The theatrical threat gets the budget, but the boring one gets ignored.

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The first thing I need you to look at is your Google Business profile, and this

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is the one I'd worry about most because it's easy, it costs nothing, and it works.

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Anyone can suggest an edit to your Google Business profile.

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They can suggest an edit to your address, your opening hours,

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your phone number, your category.

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They can suggest that you're permanently closed, and suggested edits can go

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live before you've noticed, especially if you never check it and you haven't

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got notifications switched on.

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Think about what that does.

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Your hours are wrong, so people turn up to a closed door.

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Your phone number's wrong, so inquiries go nowhere.

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You're marked as permanently closed, so people looking for

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you decide you've gone under.

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None of that is an SEO problem in the technical sense, and all of

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it costs you money immediately.

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Whether it's a competitor being an asshole or just some helpful soul with

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bad information, the fix is the same.

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Claim it, check it, and put your notifications on

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So that's your Google Business Profile.

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The next thing is someone getting into your website.

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Being hacked is by far the most common way an outsider actually

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damages your search visibility, and it usually isn't even personal.

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It's automated.

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It's looking for out-of-date plugins, and it's not targeting you specifically.

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What it does is inject pages you can't see on your own site or adds redirects that

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only fire for visitors coming from search, so everything looks completely normal

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when you type in your own web address.

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Meanwhile, Google's crawling a site full of spam, and eventually it acts on it.

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I'm gonna do a full episode on this 'cause I think it deserves

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one, and there's a lot to say about how you spot it and what you do.

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But for today, just know that this is the real version of the

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thing people are scared of, and the protection you need is boring.

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Update your fucking software next one makes me really angry, and it's

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getting more and more frequent.

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Someone scrapes your pages, publishes it as theirs, and then files a copyright

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complaint claiming that you copied them.

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Your page gets removed from Google's results.

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You did nothing wrong.

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You own the content, and you're the one who disappears while you sort it

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out, and sorting it out takes weeks.

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And that's a separate episode as well because the processes for dealing with

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it needs proper explaining, and I'm not gonna give you half of it, but it's real.

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It's happening to small businesses, and it's the one genuine remote

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attack on this list that requires no technical skill whatsoever

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The next one is your reviews.

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Review bombing is real.

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It's usually more about your reputation than your rankings, and I've covered

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the review side of things elsewhere, so I'm not gonna go over it again,

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but it's worth knowing it exists, and it's worth having a process for it.

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And then, of course, we have the people who already have your keys.

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It's not an attack as much as leverage.

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If a former agency owns your domain, your search console property, your

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analytics, or your business profile, they don't need to attack anything.

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They just need to stop cooperating.

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I did a whole episode on ownership early on, in episode two , and it's the one I'd

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most like every listener to have acted on

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So after the break, the checks.

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There's four of them.

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They're free, and between them, they cover everything on the list that

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you can do something about today.

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Here's your homework.

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One, check for a manual action.

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Go to Search Console, look at the manual action reports.

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Takes 10 seconds, and it either says, "No issues detected," or it

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tells you what Google's done and why.

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If it says no issues detected, nobody's penalised you.

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Nobody's links have done anything to you.

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You can stop worrying about that entire category.

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While you're in there, look at the security issues report as well.

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Number two, look at your own site the way Google sees it.

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In Google, search site:yourdomain.

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yourbusiness.co.uk, no spaces.

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That shows you what Google has indexed.

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Scroll through it.

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You're looking for pages you don't recognise, titles in a language you

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don't publish in, casino pages you definitely didn't put on your website.

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If you find any, that's an injected spam problem, and you need somebody

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looking at your hosting, not your SEO.

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Number three, go and look at your Google Business profile

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properly, not a glance at it.

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Check the address, the hours, the phone number, the category , the

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website link, character by character.

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Check it isn't flagged as closed.

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Go into the settings, turn notifications on, so you find out when somebody

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suggests a change instead of finding out when a customer rings

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up asking why you've shut down.

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Number four, write down who owns what.

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Domain registrar, hosting, Search Console, Analytics, business profile.

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If the answer to any of those is, "I think the agency has that," or, "Bob

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the web designer has that," that's your job this week, and it matters more

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than anything else in this episode.

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And the negative homework, which is my favourite kind, if somebody's currently

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charging you monthly for backlink monitoring or negative SEO protection and

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you've got no manual action, cancel it.

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Put the money towards your service pages.

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The pattern here is the same one I keep coming back to.

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The dramatic threat gets sold to you because fear is easy to invoice for.

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The boring threats, out-of-date software, an unclaimed listing, an

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agency holding your logins, these don't come with a nice slide deck, and those

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are the ones that take businesses down.

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If this was useful, follow SEO Fucking What wherever you're listening so

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you don't miss the next one, and stick it in front of anyone who's

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just been told they're under attack.

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My On-page SEO toolkit is now free, so go and grab it at nonwankyseo.com.

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And until next time, get found, make money, and go and check your opening hours