
Negative SEO: Is Negative SEO (aka “Google Bowling”) Still Real in 2025?
Negative SEO (aka “Google Bowling”) was once a huge threat to websites and webmasters. As Google has expanded into natural language processing, negative SEO is less of a threat than it once was. Google typically ignores irrelevant and low quality links. But don’t let that make you complacent! While successful negative SEO attacks are VERY rare, they can still have a massive negative impact on your site and traffic. If you feel you’ve been the victim of a negative SEO attack, you are not alone. We’ve been hit with multiple. Here is one fairly recent example: What are Negative SEO Attacks When someone attacks your site with negative SEO, they are employing unethical black hat SEO strategies to manipulate your rankings and bring you down in search engine results. There are a number of ways this is done: Thousands of overtly spammy backlinks to your site (e.g. link farms and link wheels) Copying content from your site and posting it all over the web Creating social profiles and review sites that speak negatively of your business Removing your top backlinks Backlinking with irrelevant links like Viagra or online poker Hacking into a website, altering the code, taking down the site or adding malicious code Forums are one of the most notorious places where negative SEO exists. There are also SEO agencies that employ these negative SEO tactics by inserting spammy links in comments. Smaller/Newer Sites are Most Impacted by Negative SEO Attacks Large businesses with established, old websites will have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of incoming links already. A negative SEO attack adding a few hundred or a thousand spam links will hardly budge that site’s ranking. The percentage of bad links is simply too low. The site may experience a brief drop in rankings, but such a bump in the road is normal for large, established sites. Small businesses and new websites looking to build a following are most at risk. It’s one of the reasons that startup SEO & digital marketing can be so difficult. Small niches can be incredibly competitive, and black hat webmasters won’t think twice about using a negative SEO attack to nuke the competition. The typical story for a small business is this. Business A is new and looking to establish itself in a niche Business B is looking to establish itself in the same niche Business A is using Google best practices and following all the rules to build traffic organically Business B sees that they can’t compete and comes up with a negative SEO attack on Business A Business A suddenly finds their site removed from rankings and penalized for black hat SEO Business B takes advantage of the temporarily vacant niche to establish themselves as the number one resource, despite a better resource existing Business A has two options; clear up the negative SEO or fail Business A has very little recourse, and it all comes down to information and timing. Types of Links that Negatively Affect SEO A lot of webmasters are having extreme difficulty determining what backlinks are negatively affecting their rankings in the SERPs. However, there are a few major types of backlinks that have the potential to reduce visibility in the search engines. Purchased Links It’s important to understand that there is nothing wrong with buying links. Thousands of companies buy links on webpages because it’s a great way to reach more people. In fact, a lot of companies make a decent ROI through links that they’ve purchased on various webpages. However, webcrawlers want webmasters to label paid links with a no-follow tag, which means ranking power is not passed through the links. Webmasters need to avoid paying for links that are do-follow, which means the links pass ranking power. Although research shows that paid links do increase Google rankings, they can also cause ranking penalties, which have catastrophic effects on SEO rankings. Non-relevant Links Webmasters should also avoid getting irrelevant links to their website. The Google Penguin update changed the importance of various ranking factors. Basically, it greatly enhanced the importance of relevant links while decreasing the power of irrelevant links. The Penguin update made link relevance crucial. It only makes sense that a website about hotel would have relevant links from websites that are about hotels or similar. If an abundance of irrelevant backlinks aren’t already hurting your online exposure, then there is a good chance that they will in the future. Put simply, it’s best to avoid obtaining irrelevant backlinks. Broken and Dead Links It’s not unnatural for many of a website’s links to become broken over a long period of time. A few broken links will not cause too much harm to your rankings, but if a website loses a large percentage of its links, it can negatively impact SEO. Both external and internal links can reduce search rankings when broken, so it’s a good idea to keep track of both. Link Networks In the last couple of years, the Internet has witnessed a massive increase in link networks. A link network can be any network of web properties that are used for the sole purpose of building backlinks to a website. There are both public and private link networks. Search engine algorithms have been taking action against the largest link networks. Some link networks are made out of websites that have expired while others are created with hundreds of free-hosted blogs. There is no denying that link networks pass serious ranking power. If they didn’t, then Google wouldn’t be attacking such networks so aggressively. However, while the ranking power of link networks can be quite potent, they also come with a huge level of risk. Due to the very strict stance that search engines have taken against link networks, both public and private, any websites caught using such networks are at risk for being penalized. In a worst-case scenario, a website might even be kicked out of the search index, which would cause a total loss of search engine