The 101s of Negative SEO

The term “negative SEO” refers to malicious practices used to harm a business’s search engine rankings. This is typically done by competitors looking to reduce the victim website’s visibility in SERPs, divert potential traffic and customers to their own websites, tarnish the victim’s reputation, and exhaust their digital marketing resources.

In other words, instead of focusing on improving one’s own SEO performance, negative SEO focuses on damaging the SEO of others. There are many tactics to achieve these results, with the most common ones being hacking, malicious link building (backlink spam), content scraping (republishing content from the victim’s website without authorization in an attempt to get the victim flagged for plagiarism), backlink removal, and review bombing.

These practices violate search engine guidelines and those caught engaging in them are often subject to severe penalties. In addition, negative SEO is also considered highly unethical and even illegal in some areas. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop malicious actors from using it against unsuspecting businesses.

Although the One Click team strictly uses ethical, time-tested SEO practices, our SEO experts cultivate a deep understanding of negative SEO in order to devise the best ways to counter it. This enables us to keep our clients’ websites safe from negative SEO tactics and quickly deal with any hacking attacks that may occur. To learn more, give us a call.

We’re Looking for More Clients Like You!

Become a part of the One Click Referral Program and earn significant bonuses for every successful referral: $1,000 if the referred client’s monthly fees are less than $5,000, and $2,000 if they’re over $5,000. Get a 10% commission from the monthly payments of the client(s) you refer and get a regular income stream for as long as they remain our client. Get in touch with our CEO at [email protected] or schedule a meeting with him to learn more

Meet Our Youngest Content Writer – Nancy Greenwood

Nancy Greenwood is a multi-talented content writer with a diverse history. With a background in biochemical engineering, data annotation, and K12 school administration, Nancy brings a specialized set of skills and a unique perspective to our team.

As a writer, she harnesses her technical knowledge and research skills to craft precisely formulated content that’s brimming with useful information and grabs readers’ attention from the first to the last word.

Beyond the realm of the professional, Nancy has a range of dynamic interests that perfectly complement her bold and adventurous spirit. When she’s not crafting high-quality content, she stays active by engaging in acrobatics, horseback riding, and – believe it or not – Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA)! We are beyond thrilled to have Nancy as part of our team and look forward to the continued success and creativity she brings to One Click.

Google Still Struggles With Some Searches

It’s no secret that, in the world of search engines, Google is the top dog. With an estimated market share of nearly 84%, they are effectively unrivaled in this space. So it may be surprising to hear that their engineers still struggle to make their search engine algorithm properly process some queries.

In a recent episode of Google’s Search Off The Record podcast, Google’s Director & Product Manager Elizabeth Tucker explained that search queries that contain the word “not” continue to give them problems. She went on to say that, “Prepositions, in general, are another hard one. And one of the really big, exciting breakthroughs was the BERT paper and transformer-based machine learning models when we started to be able to get some of these complicated linguistic issues right in searches.”

The key takeaway from this is that clear and well-written content is key to ensure Google understands what a website is all about, and is therefore able to rank it properly. Webmasters should also have SEO specialists on their team who are able to further facilitate this through the use of technical SEO best practices, monitor relevant search traffic and rankings for complex queries, and adjust their course accordingly.

Want to learn more about all the steps required to ensure your website is attracting leads? Click below and consult with our SEO experts directly: