Linkless Negative SEO

[Devil Anse]

I read this today...

Source: https://goralewicz.co/blog/negative-seo-with-no-backlinks-a-case-study/

Basically, this guy had clients who had everything perfectly clean and should have been dominating but weren't. So he did a full-scale investigation and eventually figured out what was going on.

Some competitors were doing two things:

1. Destroying his page loading time during the hours when the owners and workers would be asleep by bogging down the server with proxies and loading big images over and over. This probably tore up his average page speed as seen by google spiders.
2. Zillions of proxies searching terms they are ranking for, and clicking everything BUT their site in the serps, thereby destroying their SERP CTR.

The guy later tests the 2nd point on his own site and it made a huge impact.

I've heard of guys searching their own branded terms and urls and clicking them, or having microworkers clicking, or botting it. I never suspected it was this powerful.

So basically there's Linkless Negative SEO going on. Good for us to be aware.

Are there any other methods that maybe this guy didnt' consider?
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I know there's stuff like click-bombing people's ads, but that's not quite what I'm getting at. I'm sure you could follow point 2 above but send maybe 1/10th of the clicks to that website, and then wait like 3 seconds and immediately bounce back to the serps. You could destroy their CTR and their bounce rate and time on site. I'm not saying we should do this, but these are things we should watch for on our own sites.

Any other ideas?

 

[Lion]

People could start trying to hurt a brand's reputation by leaving false reviews on those sites that rank real easily and then spam them to the top, even over some of your own properties like your social network pages.

 

[Holly]

Scary :S Is there anything we can do about this?

 

[Andrewkar]

Good read but technique itself isn't new. I have never used bot to neg seo competitors but used it to improve my own rankings. It works... both ways.