With Google’s recently started war on paid links, the threat of negative SEO being used by competitors has been discussed a lot in the SEO community. Indeed, whenever Google publicly declares any offsite tactic as frowned upon, there is a discussion about the possibility of using this very tactic against competitor sites to get them banned or dropped in the SERPs. Considering how dificult it is to define the authorship of any offsite activities, it is no wonder. After all, multiple examples of Google bowling and Google bombs are well known.
What’s even worse, sometimes the site owners unknowingly help negative SEO efforts by creating vulnerabilities on their site that can be exploited by others. These can be: duplicate content, absense of the robots.txt file, poor site navigation, to name just a few.
Another version of negative activity against a site is creating negative online reputation. You may still be ranking for your keywords, yet if your potential customers look up your business’ name in Google they may see negative mentions which will influence their decision to become your customers.
Luckily, many of these issues can be fixed or even prevented before any malicious activity happens. Here is a great post with a list of sites that can be used to leverage your business’ online reputation. As for eliminating onsite vulnerabilities, it takes a close look at your site to identify them.
I’ve been approached a few times by people asking me how they can remove a competitor’s site from the SERPs. I never took on those jobs but even a quick check of some of the sites revealed that with some of them, it wouldn’t have been difficult to do it due to their flaws. This made me launch a new service – SEO security consulting. Hopefully it will help interested site owners protect themselves from possible malicious activities.
UPDATE: To facilitate online reputation management, I have created a custom Ubiquity command to check BoardTracker for mentions of a keyword or a site across forums and discussion boards. Enjoy!