Preventing a website from being hacked
For negative SEO to work, it's unlikely that the hacker will take over your site completely in this case. You'll still have full access to your site while the attacker installs any spam signals you may have missed. For example, tampering with your robots.txt or sitemap files can do damage to your site without you noticing any direct, obvious changes.
To detect security breaches, you can set up Google Search Console notifications . You can also regularly run audits of your site to fix technical issues.
Additionally, you can use this simple tool that provides a high-level overview and tells you if there are any signs that your website has been hacked.
Finally, you can use The FTC Complaint Assistant to report a hack.
Fighting fake backlinks
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John Mueller on disavowing links. Click to view the original tweet.
According to John Mueller, using the Disavow tool can be a good idea if you think you have been attacked and someone is generating toxic links pointing to your website.
Some users claim that disavowing works when it comes to negative SEO.
But what are you supposed to do when someone generates thousands of toxic backlinks phone code philippines pointing to your site? You'll need to disavow them using the same process you use to resolve a manual Google action.
In all cases you must go link by link, collecting them according to a criterion and disavowing them .
How Fake Backlink Generation Works
Below are two examples of negative SEO campaigns that are based on generating toxic backlinks.
Example 1
Within a span of three months from October 2018, a small business faced a sudden surge in the number of backlinks pointing to its website. The number of backlinks grew immensely from 275 to 341,824.
This unusual spike resulted in manual action by Google. The webmaster had to run an in-depth backlink audit and submit a reconsideration request to Google along with disavow files.
It took two requests for reconsideration to lift the penalty filter, which was removed in August 2019, almost a year later.
In the second request, the webmaster emphasized that it was a negative SEO attack, which helped clear things up and lift the penalty. And as of today, the rankings are still recovering.
Example 2