what is Negative SEO?

[Laiba]

I am just confused about term Negative SEO? It methods and how we can know our site got hit by negative SEO?

[Lalit]

SEO promotes a website and attracts the relevant traffic. Developing relevant backlinks is considered an important element of SEO.

If you were to develop backlinks to irrelevant sites - and link up your competitor to these ir-relevant sites, then you are indulging in negative SEO It is like " If you can not improve, then make others look bad"

[Shreya]

Negative SEO means spamming. Many types of way of spamming like excessive use of keywords, too much link building, but back links from another...

These are the techniques of black hat SEO which do not help you for ranking...

This is negative SEO..

[amber shaheen]

Competitors are always a major part of any business whether is it is physical or online. SEO business also has competition of ranking and to surpass in earning by a quality site. Ranking is the backbone of SEO and our competitor can hurt our ranking in search engine. Competitors can use malevolent activities to hurt the ranking of our site and to bring their own site in search engine ranking.
Many people use white hat SEO to get this ranking but some use the opposite way. They don’t improve their site ranking and quality instead they start to attack on the other’s site to bring it down in ranking. This technique is called Negative SEO.
Every webmaster want to deal with negative SEO as soon as possible so I would like to share some points related to malicious attack on our site for my all new learners of SEO ( me too ).
Those points are:
Malicious Attack:
Most common used practice is to have malicious attack on other’s site in which competitors hacks the detail of our site, get in to detail, make changes in robots.txt files and put Spammy content on our site. Spammy content is against the rules of Google so they use it to hurt the ranking of site in the eye of Google.
Bad/Un-natural links:
In this method competitors created un-natural or bad links for the site which they want to hurt. For this bad links they use Adults, gambling and casino related sites to create backlinks for your sites and pay to those sites webmasters. When Google check the bad links than ranking start to drop down and site get hurt badly.
Spam Reports Preparation:
In this practice reports are send to Google that site is working against the rules and guidelines of Google. Google consider it abusing and check the whole site and working to see if you are doing anything which Google doesn’t allow. If Google find this our site can be penalized and competitors can bring their site in ranking.
Ways to check if negative SEO has been done to our site:
If we want to check that if there any negative SEO has been done to our site or not we should follow these ways.
1: use Google Webmaster Tool to check the stats of our sites and have check and balance on back links. Google Webmaster Tool notifies us if there is any malware or bad link found. So if we find anything unusual it’s time to take action to correct it.
2: if any sudden drop down in traffic has been found than there is a lot of chance that negative SEO has been done to our site. Analytics data will report all the change in traffic. We should also check all stats to make it sure we are doing nothing against Google Webmaster guidelines.
So these were the things which will let us know about when our competitors try to hurt the ranking or traffic of our site. Next I will publish how to recover from negative SEO.

[Jackson Tom]

It is a process of demoting a webpage or a website from SERPs.

Negative SEO refers to when one website buys links and points them at a competitor’s website in an effort to torpedo their rankings.

[James]

negative seo refers to building links to less than 1 pr sites. they are useless sites and affect negative on the site.

[Gagii]

You should promote your business online in natural way. Don't spend more and more effort only to promote your website or business on the web. What do some of good bloggers to promote their business? They do only natural SEO.

Negative SEO is like a bad practices to promote your business which are break the search engine rules. Every search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo have their own generic rules to show results on their organic areas.

Their are some of common rules which are followed by most of search engines. Those are divides on two parts "on-page SEO" and "off-page SEO". You must read these rules on MOZ.COM before start any SEO program.

To protect your website from bad impact by using negative SEO practices, you should use webmaster tools. Some of major search engines have their own free to use tools. But you can also use some of paid online tools.

I recommend you Google webmasters and Bing webmasters tools. Follow their rules and get good results.

[techpiles]

If your website ranking & traffic going down day by day and you did spamming for your website, then you can conform automatically that your website hit by google.

[Jack]

Anything that is against google!

[Mathan]

don't spend your valuable time to do improper way to promote your website. i have a one small idea
step 1: create a own blog in different blog websites
step 2: uploading a content randomly with our site link
step 3: submit this blog url into search engines
stop 4: doing on-page optimization for your own website
step 5: generate a sitemap to search engines
step 6: doing some off-page process to your blog website

finally you got a result in all search engine with alexa ranking;
Note: (your blog content will be relevant to your own website)