[kokopoko]

I knew negative SEO existed, but always assumed it was in the more profitable and highly contested areas of the net, but the case study on how justgoodcars.com tanked has scared me. I work for a company with hundreds of employees, all with families and mortgages. What in the world can I do to protect our site from negative SEO?

I had always thought there is nothing you can do to protect yourself if a competitor wanted to destroy you with negative SEO, but now I want to find out if that is still the case or if there is something you can do. Please help!

[RealEcon]

....start an Adwords PPC campaign.

[kokopoko]

....start an Adwords PPC campaign.

We've got one going, has been for a long time.

[DamageX]

The best protection is to have a solid, aged, authoritative site, which offers a lot of value and has tons of unsolicited incoming links.

So no, there's nothing you can do.

[RealEcon]

If someone wants to put your sites link on 10-20 cheap domains, and then after a week delete your link from those sites. Those domains will be deindexed within 30 days and your site will get a hefty -10000 penalty, there really is nothing you can do.

Welcome to the new war Google has started.

Edited by RealEcon, 19 April 2012 - 08:39.

[Fixer]

Man don't worry about it. You will probably just be worrying about something that will never happen.

Alternatively you set up a second site and try to rank that also, at least you are making it twice as difficult for anyone to come along and wreck your business. Keep the adwords then during the time you need to work on rankings if the worst happens then just up the budget, easy to say but I know this is not currently a major issue. If something like this does happen then obviously one of your competitors has done it so do it to everyone on the page one.

Then within a month or two evey site on the interweb will have a negative campaign going

[Pat]

It won't last.

If things continue to play out how they are now where it is seemingly easy to knock people around then a change will be made.

Although they lack consistency, at least one thing we can rely on Google for is constant change.

[SirKnight]

....start an Adwords PPC campaign.

This is exactly what Google is pushing for. Their goal is to corral the sheeple away from the organic SERPs and lead them into plunking down wads of cash into PPC campaigns.

All of the chaos taking place in the SERPs is all part of Google's cleverly designed SEO social engineering scheme.

One can take such actions when they are essentially monopolizing an industry or market the way Google monopolizes the World Wide Web.

Google is acting just like AT&T did before the forced deregulation and if you are going to win with SEO, you need to accept what Google is doing and devise SEO strategies with that truth in mind.

[RealEcon]

...you need to accept what Google is doing and devise SEO strategies with that truth in mind.

There is no SEO now. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. What is there to optimize now? Simply put, if Google doesnt change the harsh penalties that are getting so easily handed out:

We will all be in the "Payday Loans" and "Insurance" niches.

"Pet Supplies" doesnt matter now. Same as "Payday Loans".

"Designer Shoes" Same as "Payday Loans".

"Childrens Clothes" Same as "Payday Loans".

"Your Keyword" Same as "Payday Loans"

If you are going to keep doing SEO you might as well go after a Payday Loan keyword so at least you will make bank if you beat down your competitors hard enough.

Here is your websites bright future in SEO.

[cardine]

Have a diverse developed backlink profile.

If Google views your site as an authority site with lots of links with lots of different anchor text coming from lots of sites that aren't bad neighborhoods, one guy sending a ton of scrapebox links won't be able to put a sizable dent in your already developed backlink profile.

But the real answer is, don't worry about it. The odds of negative SEO happening to you are very close to 0%.

[negativeseo]

Press releases with places like prweb, prnewswire, marketwire etc... Get backlinks from those news sites. Great authority, impossible to get rid off.

[kokopoko]

But the real answer is, don't worry about it. The odds of negative SEO happening to you are very close to 0%.

Not if you're #3 in a highly contested keyword market.

[cardine]

Not if you're #3 in a highly contested keyword market.

I'm sure this is changing a little bit but most SEOers do not do any negative SEO whatsoever. I'm sure some people on TrafficPlanet are, and maybe some people outside of TrafficPlanet, but out of the whole SEO community that probably totals up to less than 0.1% of SEOers who actively do negative SEO. And since you are not always competing against SEOers for top spots I would say that the odds of you going up against somebody who is going to use negative SEO to try to knock your site offline is basically 0.

Plus negative SEO is probably one of the worst ways to take care of a competitor. There are so many things that could go wrong (such as you helping the competitor out). If somebody really wants to knock you off the top of Google and would rather do it by hurting you instead of helping themselves, they'll be far more likely to do something like spoofing spam complaints from your site and geting your hosting company to take your site offline (and this method is basically unpreventable and doesn't have the possible accidental side effect of helping the site you're trying to hurt).

Negative SEO is getting blown into something way bigger than it actually is.

[100k]

You must brown-nose Matt ***** as deep as you can (boy can I paint pictures). Oh wait... that did not work. Ayy Dan?

[jonking]

I knew negative SEO existed, but always assumed it was in the more profitable and highly contested areas of the net, but the case study on how justgoodcars.com tanked has scared me. I work for a company with hundreds of employees, all with families and mortgages. What in the world can I do to protect our site from negative SEO?

I had always thought there is nothing you can do to protect yourself if a competitor wanted to destroy you with negative SEO, but now I want to find out if that is still the case or if there is something you can do. Please help!

It's very, very unlikely that justgoodcars.com was hit by negative seo. All the evidence points to their own spammy SEO techniques catching up on them and their traffic drop coincides exactly with when panda hit the UK on April 11 2011.

[stf]

best thing you can do is to STOP talking about this ***** and remove threads like these before things go out of control for EVERYONE!

[Scipio]

All you can do is giving more value to domainage and building big authority sites.

[Slowdive]

Decrease your reliance on google. If you have a website that only earns via its serp with G then you are likely under monetized and certainly not viable in long term. There is plenty of money in being top of G for a search term and its a great earner but its also not a solid foundation. As most competitive websites are vulnerable to algorithm changes, negative-seo in all forms, or evening being reported.

So the only protection is to become less google reliant and begin sending a lot of positive off site messages out, via social networks, backlink profiles, and activity. My feelings anyway.

[GodMode]

Keep building quality backlinks around your site and they will take care about low quality spamming. Link diversity and quality is the key.

[LBDee]

edit: removed

Edited by LBDee, 23 April 2012 - 10:01.