Negative SEO is any attempt to lower another site's search rankings. The version people fear most, pointing thousands of spam links at a competitor, rarely works, because Google largely ignores links it judges to be spam and has said the disavow tool was not built for this. The attacks that do real damage are different: hacking, scraping, fake reviews, and bot traffic that distorts click data.
Spam links, the famous one
Google's position is that it ignores links from sites where natural links are unlikely, and its staff have said there is no need to disavow them. An attacker would have to build links convincing enough to pass as real, in a pattern that looked like the victim built them, at a cost that would usually buy the attacker better rankings of their own. It happens, but it is rare and rarely effective. If a burst of junk links appears in your profile, note the date and watch. Almost always nothing follows.
The ones that work
Getting into the site. A compromised site serving spam pages or redirects to visitors is removed from results fast, and Search Console will show a security issue. Keeping software updated and access locked down is SEO work as much as security work.
Copying the content. A scraper that republishes your pages before Google has indexed them can occasionally be taken as the original. Fast indexing of your own content, through links from crawled pages, is the defence.
Fake reviews on your business profile, which hit local rankings and trust directly. And click manipulation: bots that search for a keyword and click the competitor's result, which shifts the aggregate behaviour Google's systems observe. That pattern shows up in Search Console as impressions and click rates moving on a schedule with no matching change in real visits.
What to monitor
Search Console's security and manual actions reports, which are empty until they are not. Your backlink profile weekly, for sudden volume with uniform anchor text. Your certificate, DNS and domain expiry, because the most effective negative SEO is the kind you do to yourself by letting a renewal lapse. And your rankings daily, so that whatever happens has a date.
What not to do
Disavow every unfamiliar link in a panic. Google's guidance is that the tool is for links you acquired that are likely to cause a manual action, and that misuse can harm your site. A defensive disavow file mostly removes links that were helping.
Sources
Where this shows up in the tracker
Every term in this glossary is something the product actually measures or acts on. Plans start at £29 a month, with rank tracking, AI visibility, the daily AI readiness scan, security and domain health, Search Console, backlinks and audits on every one of them.
Related terms
Disavow tool
The disavow tool is a Search Console feature that lets you upload a list of links or domains and ask Google to ignore them when assessing your site. Google describes it as an advanced feature that can harm your site if misused, and says you should only use it when you have a considerable number of spammy or paid links and those links have caused, or are likely to cause, a manual action. For most sites that never happens.
Toxic backlinks
Toxic backlinks, spammy backlinks and high spam-score links are all names for links that an SEO tool has flagged as coming from low-quality or manipulative sites. The score is the tool's estimate, not Google's judgement. Google says it ignores most such links on its own, so a red number in a report is usually information, not an emergency.
Link spam
Link spam is Google's term for links created primarily to manipulate search rankings. Its spam policies name buying or selling links for ranking purposes, excessive link exchanges, automated link building, forum and comment links stuffed with keywords, and paid placements that do not block ranking credit. The consequence is usually that the links stop counting; in serious cases it is a manual action against the site that acquired them.
CTR
Click-through rate is the share of people who saw your result and clicked it: clicks divided by impressions, shown as a percentage in Search Console. It falls steeply with position, so it only means anything when compared against the position it was earned at. Whether Google uses clicks to rank is a question with two honest halves, covered below.