Digital marketing has continued to experience transformation over time, and one of those tactics that have continued to gain attention and usage by marketers is search engine optimization (SEO). The reason for this is not far-fetched from the digital traffic marketers gain from search engines.

As SEO continues to gain popularity, marketers have also continued to devices various ways to show up in the highly competitive space provided by search engines. As black hat and white hat techniques become much more difficult, marketers now use Negative SEO tactics to show up in search engine result pages.

In my last training titled, "major types of SEO you should consider for your business," I explained the term SEO and highlighted the various types. While I have also dealt with the concept of black hat SEO in my training titled, "Top black hat SEO techniques you must avoid."

Let us begin this training session by looking at the concept of negative SEO, after which I will begin to show you how to avoid it.

What is Negative SEO

Negative SEO is a practice of using black hats SEO techniques to affect the ranking of a competitor's website to reduce their rankings on search engines. Negative SEO can be used to attack both on-page and off-page SEO. Below is a list of some of the common forms of negative SEO attacks.

1. Content Scraping
2. Creating spammy links to your websites from attackers
3. The use of wrong keywords to redirect malicious links to your website.
4. Direct website hacking
5. Ruining your online reputation with fake social profiles
6. Washing off your websites from your best backlinks