Q. In your experience, what is a typical case of a really effective negative SEO campaign? What does it usually include?
A. There are some approaches that work reasonably well.
The simplest is image theft/hotlinking from india contact number list a huge number of domains with TLDs "far far away". For example, your site is domain.de and the domains pointing to it are from .gq, .tk, .cc, and so on.
Additionally, "The Globe" and similar patterns (webhostlist.in) also drop rankings.
NOTE: The Globe (theglobe.net) is a spam website that posts toxic links. It has been online since 2006.
Other typical negative SEO patterns are content theft and mixing content with porn, online gambling, or medical material with canons that point to the original website.
Redirects from toxic websites to very good websites are also very effective.
Q. On average, how many cases of negative SEO do you encounter per year?
A. I see a lot of image theft/hotlinking and links from sites like "The Globe". I also see redirects a lot. Canonicals are less common, I see them 2-3 times a year.
Q. What are the most difficult cases of negative SEO you have dealt with?
R. Negative links along with content spam on an e-commerce site. Every new content was stolen and placed on different sites to obscure the TLDs.
When you first visit the site, there is a product listing with products/items from the original site, plus snippets of text from the original page. The second site retrieval leads to a dating site with multiple redirects. This means the original page wasn't even in the SERPs for the brand name.
It took us almost 7 months to get rid of the problem and find a working solution for the client. We reported the stolen content to Google almost daily to get back the previous good results.
Q. How often do webmasters and site owners believe they have been hit by negative SEO when in reality their rankings have dropped due to poorly maintained backlink profiles and/or weak or unoptimized content on their websites?
A. Oh, that happens to me a lot. I only refer to negative SEO when the negative patterns have been intentionally set by someone.
