If you are the victim of a negative SEO campaign, John Mueller of Google gives you pointers on how to handle it.
Someone believes they are the target of a negative SEO campaign and is seeking assistance. He responds when someone asks Google Search Advocate John Mueller how to handle negative SEO attacks, such as rivals building spammy links to his domain. This is the issue that Mueller addresses in the r/SEO forum.
Ignore the problem, Mueller says. Here is his complete answer:
“I’d disregard them.”
“Consider it this way. If your rivals are competent, they won’t build links for you. The links won’t contain any effect if your competitors are incompetent.”
According to Mueller, a competitor competent enough to build links probably wouldn’t waste their time with negative SEO attacks. Why would someone build links to a competitor’s site? That is Mueller’s response, which is direct and to the point.
Google ignores numerous links, such as low-quality links that a malicious actor may create in large quantities to harm a competitor’s rankings. Website owners and SEOs, therefore, should not be concerned about such assaults, as Google will not count the links against a site’s rankings.
Although negative SEO has been a topic of discussion for years, Google’s position on the subject is worth reviewing again. With so many search updates released in recent years, it is worth revisiting Google’s approach to this matter.
That tool is designed to help you recover from manual penalty actions. According to Mueller’s advice in the Reddit thread, using the disavow tool is consistent with his previous advice. Furthermore, he has previously stated that you should take your time disavowing spammy links if you are worried about negative SEO. Google ignores blatantly spammy links, so there is no need to disavow them.
According to voting on Twitter earlier this year, most SEO professionals don’t utilize the disavow tool on spammy links. There is a lot of confidence in Google’s capability to handle them automatically. However, there is no harm in using the disavow tool if it makes you feel more comfortable.
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