Remember: Google doesn’t like it when people try to game the system and now, with Hummingbird, they have a way to shut you down. The result is that the algorithm says you’re spamming the web or trying to game the system. Their goal is to flood the web, which grabs the attention of the spiders and then shoves a bunch of “bad” stuff at them. People engaging in negative SEO are creating “old school” (aka bad, poorly written, keyword stuffed, non-contextually linked) content and aiming it at their competitors. More importantly, site owners caught using the old system are penalized for lack of context and relevancy because the old link structure often sticks out like a sore thumb. So, while last year content creators would have to find a way to wedge “Los Angeles rental cars” contextually into a paragraph, now writers use “find rental cars in Los Angeles.” The anchor text needs to be longer and include things like stop words. In some ways, this is good because it helps writers (ahem) write more conversationally.

Hummingbird is also forcing a change to the structure of links. The context of the links isn’t the only thing demanding your attention.

In a post for Search Engine Land, Nate Dame writes “Google will notice high bounce rates, the lack of natural social sharing, and a variety of other signals no matter how many links you build…” Now, to be fair, contextual linking was more of a Penguin rule than a Hummingbird rule, but Hummingbird has really piled on the pressure.īecause Hummingbird is designed to benefit the site user (not the site builder) and it effectively builds upon the Penguin and Panda changes, Google has started paying very close attention to how the link clickers behave. While most site owners have adapted quite well to the smacking down of duplicate content, they are having a harder time adapting to the enforcement of contextual linking. What’s more, Google punishes for that now. You can’t, for example, link to a site selling swimming pool filters in the middle of an article about choosing a Nanny for your children (unless you can find a way to make that section and the sales site relevant). Thanks to the Penguin update, when you link out to someone or something, not only does the anchor text have to be relevant to the text surrounding it in your content but the site being pointed to by the link has to be relevant to the content as well. Let’s take a second to look at what Hummingbird means for your links. You already know what Hummingbird is and what its changes mean for your content. Today the Google spiders place the biggest premiums on context and relevancy. Today, though, things are much different. They could simply buy links from good sites, create lots of positive content using those positive keywords and, basically, flood the web with positivity. This meant that website owners had a much easier time combating negative SEO. It’s All Hummingbird’s FaultĪ couple of years ago, SEO was primarily a numbers game. Imagine someone creating a bunch of terrible, spun content and linking that back to your site. Imagine someone copying your content and publishing it all over the web. Imagine a spammer hacking into your site and creating lots of non-contextual links outward to a competitor. Imagine someone creating tons of random and non-contextual links to your homepage and to subpages within your site. Now, imagine someone using negative keywords and linking those negative keywords to your site. You’ve got internal links between the pages of your site. You’ve worked hard to build relationships with highly ranked websites and built a plethora of organic inbound links. You choose positive keywords for your content. Think of all of the things you do to promote your site using SEO. It is something that spammers and competitors have used against each other for years. Negative SEO is, essentially, exactly what it sounds like: it is the act of using SEO against a competitor. So what is it and what can you do about it if it happens to you? What is Negative SEO, Exactly?

Since the releases of Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird, though, negative SEO has become a much bigger threat. It’s been around since SEO became a thing. In many respects, “Negative SEO” isn’t anything new.

Negative seo checker