What Is Negative SEO, and How Much Impact Can It Have?

Negative SEO involves malicious efforts to harm someone else’s search visibility—for example, making a website appear to violate search engine policies or damaging a business’s image so that users are reluctant to click. Not all spam links constitute negative SEO, and a drop in rankings alone does not establish that an attack has occurred. Assessing its impact requires distinguishing between attack methods, determining whether actual damage occurred, and considering other explanations for ranking changes. The available material is insufficient to establish a generally applicable percentage loss.

The key is malicious sabotage, not anomalies alone

A Semrush article dated 2020 defines negative SEO as a malicious attempt to undermine a business’s search visibility. The goal may be to get search engines to lower a competitor’s rankings or to make users lose trust in the business. The methods listed in the article include:

• Hacking a website to delete or alter content, redirect URLs to spam pages, or install malware.
• Impersonating a business when contacting other websites to request the removal of beneficial backlinks.

However, unusual links do not necessarily mean someone is targeting a website. In a 2014 article, Screaming Frog mentioned loosely monitoring unnatural links since mid-January of that year, but suggested that the spam articles might simply have cited its website to appear credible, rather than as a deliberate attack. This was the author’s assessment of a particular case, not an explanation for all spam links.

How significant is the impact? The sources disagree

The Semrush article discussed above argues that search engines are increasingly able to identify and ignore these attacks, so negative SEO is often ineffective and unlikely to cause declines in rankings or organic traffic. However, the article also notes that many marketers still believe attacks can damage rankings and reputations. These are the article’s assessments, not a guarantee of the protections currently offered by all search engines.

A 2017 article on Neil Patel’s website states, based on the author’s experience, that negative SEO has no lasting effect. In contrast, Warrior Forum user Topkat325 reported that their rankings suffered after their content was copied onto spam websites. The former is not a study of negative SEO’s effectiveness in general, while the latter does not provide sufficient evidence to rule out other causes. It is therefore not possible to guarantee that negative SEO is completely harmless, nor should a victim’s explanation be treated as proven causation.

To assess severity, first establish what happened

Based on these materials, an assessment can begin with three separate questions:

• What anomalies can be confirmed?Unfamiliar links, deleted or altered content, and malicious redirects are different events and should not be conflated.
• What damage has actually occurred?Damage to website content or users’ exposure to malware is a problem in itself; it deserves attention even without a drop in rankings.
• Can the ranking changes be attributed to the suspected attack?An anomaly occurring alongside a decline is still insufficient to prove causation. Semrush also cautions that rankings can fall for many other reasons.

The point is not to assume that spam links mean an attack has occurred, but to investigate malicious intent, actual damage, and search performance separately before assessing the impact.