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Negative SEO has exists for long time and there are ways how to does it. The basic explanation of this method is the SEO practice using black hat techniques on another site. For the most part, a negative SEO attack is being done by a competitor using malicious manner to lower other website’s ranking in search result. Kristi Hines from Search Engine Watch gives her thought on negative SEO,

“I consider negative SEO anything that could harm your reputation, visibility, or traffic in search.”

This is currently the trending issue in SEO with the fact that there are people who still doing it. In 2012, webmasters and online marketers gave their concern about negative SEO to Google Webmaster’s admission. Matt Cutts as a member of Google’s Webmaster team released a statement in a video that says,

“In my experience, there are a lot of people who talk about negative SEO, but very few people who actually try it. And, fewer still, who actually succeed.”

He also said that small website owners don’t have to worry if they could be the target of negative SEO, because this black hat tactic only being report from very niche markets that consists of bigger website and in high competitive business.

Google also released a tool that can help to remove negative SEO practice. In October 2012, Google lunched a new webmaster to with function to disavow any back links. This tool can makes webmasters to disavow or remove back links that their websites get. Any black hat activities like manual spam or unnatural links to a website are being notified to its webmasters, so they can easily disavow link or domain. This is certainly helps Google and other search engines to fix the problem from the base, and this is a very easy way to do with just submit spam or unnatural link on the URL box.

But even with Google released disavow link tool, there is still skepticism and horror stories about negative SEO can ruined company’s incoming traffic and online reputation. As a response, many SEO companies are being active to give their knowledge as many as possible through blog articles on how to monitor negative SEO and to take preventive acts as a defensive method against people who using black hat techniques.

There are few steps that webmasters can do to protect their website. The first and main step is to set up email alerts in Google Webmaster account to notification about all information and issues associated to website as priority. There are also other advanced steps like monitor back links of website, disavow or remove suspicious back links, and secure website from malwares and hackers.

image source: business2community.