Negative SEO
In one line
Negative SEO refers to outside attacks intended to drag a competitor's rankings down — typically through spammy backlink campaigns or scraped, duplicated content.
Going deeper
Negative SEO is the umbrella for hostile actions aimed at sinking a competitor's rankings — spammy backlink storms, scraped or duplicated content, fake reviews, fraudulent DMCA filings and similar plays.
Google's algorithms now ignore most unnatural links, but immunity isn't total. If a short window suddenly delivers a flood of links from low-quality domains, reviewing GSC's Disavow tool to formally repudiate them is the standard response.
The more common incident is actually content-side. When your articles get scraped at scale and republished elsewhere, engines can lose track of which copy is the original and rank yours lower. Routine content monitoring and clean canonical signals are the baseline defence.
Related terms
Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO is the umbrella for tactics that deliberately violate search-engine guidelines to chase short-term rankings — high-risk plays that get hit with penalties when caught.
SEOGoogle Penalty
A Google penalty is any drop in visibility imposed for guideline violations — split between manual actions taken by a human reviewer and automatic algorithmic adjustments.
SEOLink Velocity
Link velocity is the rate at which a domain acquires new backlinks over time — and whether the curve looks organic or suspiciously spiky is itself a signal search engines watch.
SEODofollow Link
A dofollow link is a regular hyperlink without a nofollow attribute — meaning search engines treat it as a normal authority-passing link by default.
SEOOff-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is the umbrella for everything that builds your domain's authority and trust outside your own site — backlinks, press coverage, brand mentions, citations.
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