Negative SEO Attack on Altitude SEO

This past week, my company domain name, altitudeseo.com was targeted with a vicious negative SEO attack. Negative SEO attacks are never fun but what makes it worse is the attacker illegally used my photo and my information and posted to thousands of websites through comment spam.

The motive behind this individual was obviously to kill good, hard earned rankings as well as reputation with the public.

As of today, hundreds of links per day are still popping popping up on ahrefs.com as well as other monitoring tools we utilize.

Fortunately, as of now it appears that the attack hasn’t had an immediate impact on our rankings. Our team is diligently sifting through the links and disavowing the domains as quickly as we can to combat this SEO version of a ‘cyber attack.’

First, why do people perform negative SEO attacks?

Negative SEO attacks are malicious in nature. They are designed to hurt ones websites visibility in major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Attackers use ‘negative SEO’ as a tactic to harm ones website by tricking search engines to believe that the attacked website is simply executing a spammy SEO campaign resulting in ranking demotion, or even removal from search engine results pages.

Another effective use of negative SEO is to help SEOs sell against you. They use your spammy link portfolio to claim that your deploying black hat SEO tactics, scaring potential customers away from doing business with you.

In this case, they took the attack one step further and used my photo, my email and my website address to make it appear as if it was actually me spamming these thousands of websites.

I take events like this very seriously. This individual is directly attempting to tarnish my reputation, my businesses reputation as well as to financially harm my employees and my family.

Lucky for me, I’ve got a vast background in uncovering schemes like this.

Stay tuned for more info as they become available…