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What is a Negative SEO Attack and how can you protect yourself?



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What is a Negative SEO Attack and how can you protect yourself?

From the way I understand it a negative SEO attack is when someone purposely performs black hat methods on your website in an attempt to trash your Google rankings to outrank you.

I've seen some people in forums asking where they can buy negative SEO attacks on a competitors website.

So this makes me kinda edgy and it is something that has been on my mind a lot, what if someone decides they don't like you and purposely and maliciously hit you with a negative SEO attack?

What exactly can you do to protect yourself against this sort of attack?

In addition to that, how do you find out who carried out the attack? And how would you take legal action against that person?

In my mind this sort of malicious behaviour can really damage a person's business yet it seems like it is quite common which is very scary!

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MasterA
This is a good question and is something I want to know about too. Not long ago, my website experienced some DDOS attacks and although it was controlled by our host, we couldn't find who done it and it has affected our business a lot. I think the problem with this kind of stuff is that it is easy to hide your identity and it is very difficult to find out who did it. While it may be possible, it will probably cost a lot of money to hire someone to work out who performed the attack and taking legal action may not even be good idea, depending on your lost as you may end up get back less than the money you spent finding who did the attack. With negative SEO, I think the best method to use to protect yourself is to monitor your backlinks and use the disavow tool before the bad backlinks can do any damage to you.

This is just what I think and personally, I have no experience in this matter.



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Lynne
That is often the case when you can take legal action against someone, there are so many costs involved even if you know who did it that it may not be worth your while anyway!

Yes I am aware of the disavow tool, thankfully I have never had to make use of it myself. I just wonder whether staying on your toes and keeping an eye on your backlinks would help. I mean by the time you realize you have been attacked surely Google would have been on it faster than you and perhaps already penalized your website?

I'm so sorry to hear that you experienced a DDOS attack, that is awful.



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EliteWriter
It is sad that some people prefer to act in this negative manner against competitors, rather than focusing their efforts on something positive for their site. I find this to be really unethical. Sadly I am not quite sure if you could do anything that effective to safeguard yourself against such an act, other than trying to keep an eye on backlinks.



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Lynne
Yes that is what I am getting to see now. A person that conducts themselves in such an awful, unethical way must be quite desperate to get ahead... the sad part is that I don't believe that anyone that does this will come out tops anyway since it takes hard work and dedication to really get ahead. Happiness is a frame of mind, not money and business success. If you can't sleep at night or look at yourself in the mirror have you made it?



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Corzhens
It looks like the competition is so heated when you have to resort to negative SEO. But I clearly understand that feeling because I had been into some local communities here where there were 3 forums fighting for supremacy. The quarrel is not limited to the admin but the venom had spread to the members. In those cases, I guess it is logical and reasonable for them to resort to negative SEO. But if I were them, I would fight with positive SEO and would try my best to improve my site in order to obtain legitimate members and visitors.



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