NEG SEO

Negative SEO (NEG SEO) is a third party trying to damage your search rankings with tactics you don't control: Floods of spammy backlinks aimed at your domain, scraped or duplicated copies of your content, fake reviews, or hacking. Google evaluates many negative signals with thresholds rather than one by one, so isolated problems rarely move rankings. Sustained attacks are the concern, because they can push a site past the point where Google reinforces negative consequences.

Most negative SEO fails because Google weighs negative signals with thresholds, so only sustained, high-volume attacks actually move rankings. Kevin's read of ranking factors is that a few 404s won't hurt, but pass a certain percentage, and Google starts reinforcing negative consequences. The same technical signals an attack exploits, 404s, duplicates, canonicals, are often not impactful on their own. Your exposure depends on ratio and volume relative to a healthy baseline.

Say a mid-market B2B SaaS company suddenly gets 40,000 spammy backlinks from gambling sites in a month. Its rankings hold, because the toxic links stay a small share of a large, healthy profile. A DTC brand with only 200 referring domains hit by the same attack is more exposed, because the toxic ratio crosses a threshold.

Monitor your backlink profile for sudden spikes in low-quality referring domains, and disavow toxic links when the ratio gets dangerous. Watch for scraped or duplicated versions of your pages, and file removal requests or assert canonicals. Keep your own technical hygiene tight so you are never sitting near a negative threshold when an attack lands. Set alerts on rankings and links so you catch an attack early rather than after traffic drops.