Negative SEO covers any malicious or unethical practice aimed at sabotaging a competitor's search rankings, and it can seriously damage a website's standing in search results. Because of that, site owners need to check regularly for signs that their site is under this kind of attack.
Beyond the classic spam-backlink attack, other tactics include scraping and republishing a site's content elsewhere to create duplicate content confusion, fake or manipulated negative reviews aimed at local listings, hacking a site to inject spam links or malware, and even sending automated bots to click a competitor's ads in an attempt to drain their paid search budget. Google has said it works to identify and discount most negative-link attacks automatically, without requiring a disavow, but that protection isn't perfect or instant, which is why regularly auditing incoming backlinks, monitoring for unexpected ranking or traffic drops, and reporting genuinely harmful links to Google through the Disavow Tool still matters as a backstop rather than a first-line defense.
