Negative SEO And How It Works [Infographic]

It is said that 11 million people search for the word SEO every month on Google. That is a lot of traffic going to all of the websites that are entirely dedicated to SEO or providing an SEO optimization service. But then again, there are 863 million websites that mention the word SEO, so the traffic to each one as a result of these searches might not be too good after all. I guess it depends on whether you are using your keywords and doing your own SEO correctly. There is one thing about SEO that is not mentioned very much, and that is negative SEO. It’s both difficult and easy to explain, depending on whether we want go into it in-depth or just scratch the surface of it.

In a nutshell, negative SEO is an evil technique used to trash someone else’s search ranking by sending a massive amount of low-end links to the site which in the end will affect that site’s ranking as a whole. It’s not as easy as it sounds, and it should really be considered a crime. To test it out properly, TastyPlacement set up an experiment. They created a website which showed up in position 3 when someone searched for with the phrase “pool cleaning houston.”

The experiment was divided up into three areas. They all did pretty much the same thing but from different locations. By sending links from blog comments, forum profile pages and sidebars, they managed to knock down their own website from the 3rd position to 14. However, it took them 45,000 blog comment links, 7,500 forum profile pages and 4,000 low end sidebar links. As you see, it’s not exactly something that you submit in an evening.

This infographic called Testing Negative SEO describes the test in detail, and it should shed more light on what exactly is going on. It is kind of sad to think about the effort that goes into optimizing your SEO knowing that someone dedicated and evil can just rip it apart and make sure the competition is drawn out of the way by using negative SEO. But you shouldn’t be depressed by this evil method. It takes a furious amount of effort in order to achieve what TastyPlacement managed to achieve.

If you just stay on top of your SEO optimization, you should have nothing to worry about. The enhancements will cancel out any or all attempts that using negative SEO might have when it comes to affecting your search ranking. I have to admit that I am no SEO expert, but I hopefully know enough not to worry about the effects of negative SEO if we just stay on top of our SEO skills. SEO is changing almost daily, and we would all do good in making sure we stay up-to-date with the changes in order to get the best result from our efforts. Content is king, never forget that. That is something no one can do anything about, not even with negative SEO.