We know that there are website owners who use certain type of SEO techniques now called “black-hat SEO” for artificially boosting their website rankings in Google and other search engines. These website owners often get penalty actions from Google for using black-hat SEO tactics and their sites are stripped of their search result rankings. But now, some in the SEO industry is discussing on ‘negative SEO’ and whether it is real or not and if real, whether Google has the resources to stop it.

Negative SEO happens when someone makes attempts lower a website’s search result ranking and according to many experts, this can be attempted in many ways. The most common type of negative SEO that is in the discussion is the link-based negative SEO and we know that Google algorithms suppress those sites which use the manipulative link building. There were those who claimed that their competitor is attacking them with bad links when in most cases, this is probably not true. If you start looking at your backlink profile and seeing some odd looking links and it’s normal for you to think, “these cheap links must be the work of my competitor!” Here are top commonly occurring situations where many website owners suspect them as negative SEO, but there is another explanation for what is really going on.

Site-wide links are not all Bad

Some site owners get worried when they look at their “Links to your site” section of Webmaster Tools and see that there are more numbers of links from one site only. For example, if you have 90,000 links pointing to your site in which 70,000 of them is coming from one website, say yellowpages.com. It will make you tense as you assume Google will think that you built those links to your site manipulatively. These links cannot be considered bad because as the site owner of yellowpages.com really liked your content and linked your site in his sidebar. Or, he may be linked to you with a keyword. Underneath the “Links to your site” section of Webmaster Tool is another section called “How your data is linked” that contains your commonly used anchor text. So, if you get a sitewide link from a website which has thousands of pages and they all linked with a keyword, you may assume that Google will see your majority links are keyword anchored. But the reality is that Google is pretty good at recognizing a sitewide link from a website and it is not a sign of negative SEO even if it causes thousands of backlinks to appear in Google Webmaster tools.

Odd Looking Links are not totally Unnatural

There are some websites that link out to almost every other website on the web. According to many SEO experts, most site owners have reported getting links from websites such as mrwhatis.net, askives.com, m.biz, links from sites that analyze and provide domain info, directories that have scraped dmoz.org, Chinese sites that scrape alexa.com and many more. Among these, m.biz has hundreds of clone directories and if you got links from these directories, you can disavow them just to be safe and that does not mean they are really negative SEO.

Someone is ‘Helping’ You with Good Intentions

You may think this as silly, but there are site owners who have reported unusual numbers of links in their link profile. Because of this, some of them got imposed penalty by Google. These site owners have assured that they never purchased or built links before, but most of them think that it must be the work of their competitor. Many SEO experts who dealt with this issue said that in most cases these link building tactics were implemented by individuals known to site owners and they did it with good intentions.

After Effects of Your Past Link-based Deeds

You may be witnessing increasing of links in your link profile which is kept replicating again and again. According to many experts, this may be due the paid link scheme you may have done in the past. Even though you have cleaned all those paid links, these links may appear which use the text that you used and when you purchased that link package. You may be thinking that it is negative SEO, but it is not and it was caused due to your actions done in the past.

Google and other search engines are aware of negative SEO and they are doing their best to avoid situations related to it. Also, Google encouraging site owners to report any unusual activity in their SEO profile to them and internet search giant will provide solutions to their queries.  When it comes to links, all websites have added links pointing to them and don’t always assume them that every weird looking link is one that your competitor has made.