As well as good SEO, there is negative SEO; blackhat techniques employed by a competitor to attempt to devalue your sites rankings in search engines, and it’s something to be on guard against.
Duplicate content
It’s important to check regularly that none of the content on your website is duplicated elsewhere on the web, and you should monitor this intermittently as it will affect SEO. Black hat techniques have included people duplicating a competitor’s web content when they change it, and submitting a site map of the duplicated page to search engines so that this duplicate content is indexed first and the original content is ignored as duplicate. It’s hard to prove this one, so watch out for it. Always make sure your content is unique, both from external pages and other internal pages on your own site.
URL manipulation
If a page on a website has dynamic URLs whilst keeping the same content, for example http://website.co.uk/index.php?page=23 and http://website.co.uk/index.php?page=24 both displaying the same page, then the site is vulnerable to negative SEO. A competitor could create hundreds of links posted all over the web in link farms, forums, directories and blogs with slightly different URLs that all point to exactly the same content, and search engines will mark this site out as using black hat techniques, and penalise it, affecting rankings.
Set up Google alerts
This is a great thing to do, both in terms of monitoring exactly what is being said online about your brand anywhere on the web; forums, articles, blogs etc, and also to detect hacking. Many spammers try to hack high-ranking sites to place links to their sites on yours. The most common types of spammers are those pedalling porn, pharmaceutical drugs and Viagra, so setting up alerts for this on your site is a valuable exercise.
Spotting damaging content in media such as forums can help you police brand protection, and most forum hosts will happily remove malicious, damaging content for your site if you approach them and explain the situation.
Google bowling
Google bowling was once a common practice, but is now, according to Matt Cutts, generally very difficult to do, and a waste of someone’s time and money.
It worked by causing search engines to believe the targeted site is overly spammy by adding numerous of links from ‘bad’ pages, such as link farms and auto-generated spammy pages. If thousands of links to the site are generated in rapid succession in only the space of a few days, a spam alert could be triggered, affecting the rankings of the targeted site.
Google is quite adept at detecting this process now, and would recognise the different patterns of link building conducted by spammers compared with your own, and would devalue these links rather than your site. However, if you have been involved in spammy link-building yourself for the same site, you could be penalised, so avoid this at all costs.
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