BizSugar.com › Online Marketing › Understanding Negative SEO and How to Counter It

Negative SEO is the exact opposite of what people try to do with search engine optimization. Your rankings slide, not because you didn’t do something properly, but because your competition has asked its dirty tricks department to wreak havoc on your rankings so that their own rank goes up in comparison. There are quite a number of ways in which negative SEO techniques can lower your page rank, however, not all sudden and drastic drop in rankings are attributable to unscrupulous competitors; there could be many other reasons.

Negative SEO is generally off-page, which means that there could be activities like unnatural link building, content scraping and reposting. However, in exceptional cases, there could be on-page actions like hacking and content modification to deliberately hurt your ranking. The different types of negative SEO explained: