To do this, the attacker must put in a lot of effort to ruin a website's reputation, and there is no guarantee that the effort will work. However, you should keep an eye on this type of activity by monitoring online reviews .
If a review is definitely fake, you should report it to the administrator where the "review" was posted. You can read more about this negative SEO practice in the article about a case of attack with fake reviews .
Keep an eye on your backlinks, especially the valuable ones. You never know when an attacker might send fake takedown requests asking your referring domain to remove links.
There is no guarantee that the webmaster where the backlink is posted will follow the fraudulent requests.
To quickly detect the disappearance of valuable links, you can set up notifications to track any backlinks in the Backlink Audit tool .
Frequently Asked Questions with a Negative SEO Expert
The SEMrush team spoke to Ralf Seybold , an expert in dealing with negative SEO campaigns, and here’s what he had to say about the problem.
Q. In your experience, what is the typical case where a negative SEO campaign is effective? What does it typically include?
A. There are some patterns that work well.
The "easiest" way is to steal images/direct links from a large number of domains with TLDs "from far away". For example, your site is domain.de and the domains that link to it come from .gq, .tk, .cc, and so on.
Also, "The Globe" and similar looking patterns (webhostlist.in) lower rankings.
NOTE: The Globe (theglobe.net) is a site where toxic links are pos