How to do Negative SEO for Reputation Management or to Kill your Competition

This isn't exactly a cyber security topic but protecting your website is and this could be something that is happening to you. First off, what is negative SEO? In April 2012 Google launched an algorithm called penguin. From that moment foward, negative SEO was born. You could now build spam links to your competitors or to knock out undesirable search results for managing your brands reputation. It wasn't just this algorithm Google launched that made this possible, but this was the beginning of several anti-spam black hat SEO algorithms released. You can see a full history at moz right here.

In October 2012, Google who had all along said in no uncertain terms you can't be hurt by negative SEO, released a disavow tool. This now made it possible to get rid of unwanted links that point to your website. You would think negative SEO is dead, right?

Think again..



While many top sites have dedicated staff do their webmaster and SEO work, not all do. Now imagine if you could come up with a simple way to apply negative SEO that doesn't target the competitor or a single URL of an unwanted search result (think here a negative review of a product or service you sell you'd like to see gone). How would you do this?

Simple...target the links to the target you want to do negative SEO on.

Let us take a simple example. Assume I am an SME selling red widgets but my competitor is beating me on main terms that sell red widgets. I could target my competitor, but a far better way to do this is to target what made your competitor rank well and that is their links. This gives you far more opportunity to hurt the value of the target. Many versus one. Now you can also target your target URL also, why not?

How do you do this? It is quite simple.

1. Use a tool like majestic to gather backlink data for your target.
2. XRumer 50,000 - 100,000 links to each of those links.
3. Watch as your target URL loses rank.

This same principle is used in reputation management to remove search results that hurt your reputation and can be part of your reputation management portfolio.

Happy Hunting!