{"id":21504,"date":"2020-01-29T16:49:39","date_gmt":"2020-01-29T16:49:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/glosario-digital\/negative-seo"},"modified":"2026-09-24T20:59:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T20:59:15","slug":"negative-seo","status":"publish","type":"encyclopedia","link":"https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/en\/digital-glossary\/negative-seo","title":{"rendered":"Negative SEO"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"boxpad alignright wp-image-22992 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/negative-seo.jpg\" alt=\"Negative SEO\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/negative-seo.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/negative-seo-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/> <strong>Definition:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Negative SEO<\/strong> is a deliberate attempt to harm another website&#8217;s organic visibility by manipulating external signals, making unauthorised changes to its assets, or obstructing search-engine access. It differs from legitimate <a href=\"https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/en\/digital-glossary\/seo\">SEO<\/a> because its purpose is not to improve the attacker&#8217;s own site but to cause harm to a third party.<\/p>\n<p>A traffic decline, the appearance of unusual links, or a ranking change does not prove an attack on its own. Attributing an effect to negative SEO requires evidence of the change, a coherent timeline, and the exclusion of technical, algorithmic, seasonal, or measurement-related causes.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What negative SEO may include<\/h2>\n<p>Actions attributed to negative SEO may affect external signals or the site itself when a security breach occurs. Common categories include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Artificial links:<\/strong> Creation of large volumes of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/en\/digital-glossary\/backlink\">backlinks<\/a> from low-quality sites, automated networks, or a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/en\/digital-glossary\/link-farm\">link farm<\/a>. Search systems may ignore many of these signals without penalising the destination.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Fraudulent removal requests:<\/strong> Impersonating the owner to request the removal of legitimate links pointing to the site.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Site alteration:<\/strong> Injecting content, links, directives, pages, or redirects after compromising the CMS, an account, or the server.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Malicious concealment:<\/strong> Unauthorised use of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/en\/digital-glossary\/cloaking\">cloaking<\/a> to show different responses to users and crawlers.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Copying or impersonation:<\/strong> Reproducing pages or the brand&#8217;s identity. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/en\/digital-glossary\/duplicate-content\">Duplicate content<\/a> does not automatically cause a penalty, so its actual effect needs to be established.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Access disruption:<\/strong> Availability attacks can temporarily prevent crawling, although their primary nature is cybersecurity rather than SEO.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Some of these actions also fall under <a href=\"https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/en\/digital-glossary\/black-hat-seo\">Black Hat SEO<\/a>. The distinction lies in the purpose: negative SEO seeks to damage another domain.<\/p>\n<h2>Signals that do not prove an attack<\/h2>\n<p>Diagnosis needs to prevent a correlation from becoming an accusation. A visibility decline may coincide with suspicious links while having another cause. Before advancing the hypothesis, review:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>technical changes, migrations, robots.txt, noindex, canonicals, or server errors;<\/li>\n<li>search-system updates and quality reassessments;<\/li>\n<li>seasonality, demand changes, or competitor movements;<\/li>\n<li>analytics, tagging, or period-comparison errors;<\/li>\n<li>natural link loss or changes made by the link owners;<\/li>\n<li>spam links that the search engine already neutralises or ignores.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>How to investigate a suspicion<\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/en\/digital-glossary\/google-search-console\">Google Search Console<\/a> provides information about manual actions, security issues, coverage, links, and changes across queries or pages. This evidence needs to be combined with server logs, deployment history, backups, and link data.<\/p>\n<p>A sound investigation checks:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Timeline:<\/strong> What changed first and whether the possible effect appeared afterwards.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Scope:<\/strong> Which URLs, queries, templates, files, or signals were affected.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Control:<\/strong> Whether access, changes, or requests originated outside authorised personnel.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Persistence:<\/strong> Whether the event was isolated or forms a repeated pattern.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Alternative causes:<\/strong> Which technical, editorial, or measurement explanations have been excluded and with what evidence.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Response and recovery<\/h2>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>Contain a breach:<\/strong> Secure accounts and systems, preserve evidence, and remove unauthorised changes.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Restore the correct state:<\/strong> Recover verified content, responses, directives, canonicals, and redirects.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Correct the source:<\/strong> Resolve the vulnerability, compromised access, or external reference that sustains the problem.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Document the incident:<\/strong> Record dates, URLs, screenshots, logs, and actions so that recovery can be compared.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Treat links cautiously:<\/strong> Assess whether a substantial pattern of artificial links and a genuine manual-action risk exists. Google states that most sites do not need its <a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/2648487?hl=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">disavow tool<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Validate over a sufficient period:<\/strong> Check security, crawling, indexing, visibility, and recurrence without attributing every variation to the intervention.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<h2>Negative SEO, GEO, and AI visibility<\/h2>\n<p>An alteration to content, identity, structured data, or technical access can affect both <a href=\"https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/en\/digital-glossary\/technical-seo\">technical SEO<\/a> and the information retrieved by other systems. A review may therefore include brand mentions, impersonating pages, and generative answers that reproduce manipulated information.<\/p>\n<p>Not every unfavourable mention or incorrect answer constitutes negative SEO or a supposed form of &#8220;negative GEO&#8221;. Generative systems may use different sources, indexes, and update times. Recovery requires correcting the controlled source, strengthening verifiable identity, and observing a set of queries over time without assuming that a removal will propagate immediately or that optimisation guarantees favourable citations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Negative SEO can harm a site&#8217;s organic visibility. Learn its tactics, warning signs, false positives, investigation, response, and impact on GEO and AI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"template":"","encyclopedia-tag":[1407,1247],"class_list":["post-21504","encyclopedia","type-encyclopedia","status-publish","hentry","encyclopedia-tag-blog-networks","encyclopedia-tag-search-spam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/encyclopedia\/21504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/encyclopedia"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/encyclopedia"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"encyclopedia-tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arimetrics.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/encyclopedia-tag?post=21504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}