Typically, SEO involves making positive changes and optimizations to your own website, business listings, and other digital assets, with the ultimate goal of providing a better user experience. Search engines reward these positive updates with better rankings in search results, which in turn help businesses perform better overall. But there's a dark side of SEO, too; it's called negative SEO.
For local businesses especially, a negative SEO attack on a Google Business Profile listing can have a potentially devastating impact, so it's important to understand how to check negative SEO attempts in order to mitigate potential long-term damage to your reputation and rankings.
What Is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO is a type of black hat, or unethical, SEO that focuses specifically on sabotaging competitors' search engine rankings. In other words, instead of focusing on improving their own SEO through positive updates and optimizations, individuals or businesses engaged in negative SEO focus on attempting to hurt their competitors' SEO efforts.
This practice clearly violates search engine guidelines, but that doesn't stop shady businesses or unethical SEO "professionals" from employing or offering negative SEO services.
What Is Negative SEO in Local SEO?
In the world of local SEO, a negative SEO attack typically targets a competing business's Google Business Profile (GBP).
The most common ways to try and hurt a competitor's GBP rankings are to use the "Suggest an edit" feature to mess with the profile's business information and to spam the profile with fake negative reviews.
For instance, competitors employing negative SEO might buy tons of fake one-star Google reviews from profiles created specifically for the purpose of leaving such reviews. They might also suggest edits to key Google Business Profile information like the website URL, business hours, or address/map pin, which, if not caught in time, can get pushed live automatically by Google.
Can Anyone Use the "Suggest an edit" Feature To Conduct a Negative SEO Attack?
Unfortunately, as it stands, anyone with a Google Account can suggest edits to Google Business Profiles.
Suggesting an edit doesn't always mean the information will get updated; Google typically notifies business profile owners of suggested edits and gives them a window of time to accept or reject the updates. But, if you don't catch an unwanted edit in time, Google may decide to push the update live.
Needless to say, something like an incorrect website URL or a moved map pin can have a devastating impact on your local search rankings, reputation, and overall business performance.
How Can You Protect Your Google Business Profile From Negative SEO Attacks?
In order to prevent unwanted edits to your Google Business Profile information, we recommend using Falcon Guard, Local Falcon's ever-vigilant GBP change monitor.
Falcon Guard monitors as many Google Business Profiles as you want for changes, notifying you whenever any occur, so you can take corrective actions before unauthorized changes have a chance to impact your performance.
This tool is especially ideal for multi-location businesses or local SEO professionals working with various clients, since it can be much easier to miss Google's notifications about suggested edits and let unauthorized GBP updates slip past and start hurting rankings when you're managing local SEO for multiple locations.
Not only that, but Falcon Guard also keeps a record of all changes to your Business Profile, so you can correlate trends in your rankings with GBP updates.
What About Negative SEO Attacks with Fake Reviews?
Fake reviews can be a little bit trickier to deal with, as they aren't always easy to spot right away. However, Local Falcon makes it much easier to do so with two different AI-powered local SEO tools: Reviews Analysis Reports and Falcon Assist.
You can discuss any Reviews Analysis Report in detail with Falcon Assist to help you spot fake reviews that could be the result of negative SEO on the part of your competitors.
For instance, Falcon Assist can single out negative reviews with overly generic language or highlight clusters of negative reviews around the same time, both of which can be indicative of a fake review-based negative SEO attack. Then, you can conduct further investigation and build a case for reporting the fake reviews to get them removed by Google.
The Bottom Line
While the majority of businesses and SEO professionals employ ethical SEO practices, negative SEO is still a very real threat, especially to local businesses relying heavily on their Google Business Profiles to attract nearby customers.
Even a single fake negative review or malicious edit to your GBP's information can have serious long-term implications for your local search performance. That's why it's so important to understand what negative SEO is, how to recognize the signs of an attack, and what steps to take to proactively protect your rankings and reputation.
Fortunately, with tools like Falcon Guard monitoring your Google Business Profile for changes and Reviews Analysis Reports combined with Falcon Assist helping you spot fake reviews through conversational, AI-driven analysis, you can stay one step ahead of malicious SEO tactics.
