John Mueller, a Google Search Advocate, explains a straightforward method to combat negative SEO attacks, such as when rivals create bogus links pointing to your domain. In response to a discussion post on Reddit, Mueller offers his thoughts on this subject. An individual feels that they are the focus of a bad SEO campaign, and they have posted a question in the r/SEO forum asking for guidance. The recommendation made by Mueller is to disregard the issue. That settles it; you can ignore it. This is his whole response:

“I’d just ignore them. Think of it this way; if your competitors are competent, they won’t build links for you. If your competitors are incompetent, the links won’t have any effect.”

The statement that Mueller has provided is succinct and to the point. It’s quite unlikely that a rival who is skilled enough to create links that Google would detect will waste their time engaging in negative SEO attacks.

Why would someone build links to a website that they were trying to compete with?

Google ignores a large number of links, including low-quality links that a malicious user may build in large quantities in an effort to hurt the rankings of a rival. As a consequence, website owners and SEOs need to ignore the above attacks, given that Google will not weigh the links against a site’s rankings. This subject comes up every once in a while, but considering the amount of search engine updates that have been released in the past few years, it is essential to review Google’s guidelines regarding negative SEO. The guidance that Mueller offered in the Reddit discussion is in line with the guidance that he has offered in the past. In addition, he has mentioned in the past that you shouldn’t be in a hurry to use the disavow tool if you’re worried about negative impacts on your SEO rankings.

Because Google ignores links that are visibly spammy, there is no requirement that you disavow them. This tool is mainly for recovering from manual action penalties. A study conducted earlier this year on Twitter found that the majority of SEO experts do not make use of the disavow tool when dealing with spammy links. There is a significant amount of faith in Google’s ability to take care of them automatically. If, on the other hand, utilizing the disavow tool helps you feel more at ease, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing so.

Source: searchenginejournal