Search engine optimization can be a funny business; tactics that were considered best practices only a short while ago can become ineffective, and the methods that produce quick boosts are often damaging in the long term. Most marketers and brands sincerely want to achieve their SEO success through a legitimate, user-friendly strategy, and are cognizant of any potential missteps that they may make. This dedication to upholding the industry standards, unfortunately, make all of us legitimate SEO professionals more susceptible to underhanded plays by more dubious black hatters.

A new black-hat tactic is threatening to malign SEO professionals and seriously damage companies’ search engine rankings. This is the step-by-step description of the black hat SEO tactic that can reverse good links that took you years to build:

The Email:

I received this email recently on behalf of one of my agency’s clients:

This email is, I first thought, from a company that operates within the same space as my client, and is asking me to remove or change to no-follow every outbound link from my client to this other company in order to make sure that the company being linked to is not penalized for a link scheme. At first glance, this seems like a legitimate email, albeit a slightly misinformed one. Our team was about to respond and elaborate on the nuances of link quality and recommend against removing those links, until I glanced quickly at the sender address.

Instead of seeing [email protected], I saw [email protected]. This email address is not consistent with any of the branding or other information in the body or email signature of the email. The whole thing felt suspicious, but I refused to believe the worst: that a competitor was launching an intentional, malicious attack against this company to force a removal of their backlinks, negatively affecting their rankings. But then I received a second email that changed my mind.

The Con:

Within the same day, I was forwarded a message from an employee in my agency; our blog had received an identical email that looked as though it was from a legitimate site, asking us to no-follow our backlinks to their site for fear of being penalized for a link scheme. The wording was identical to the email I received on behalf of my client, and the sender address read [email protected] instead of [email protected]. After digging into the backlinks in question, and examining the two emails, I knew for a fact: someone was trying to goad my agency and our client into removing solid, legitimate backlinks in order to hurt ratings, making it easier for someone else’s rankings to improve.

This con is simple:

• Someone cannot get their website to the top of the search rankings because of good quality websites that are in the way. Let’s say one of these good websites is XYZcompany.com.
• Their goal is to bring the good quality website down in order to make room for another lower quality site such as theirs.
• All good links of XYZcompany.com are identified and the webmaster’s email addresses are gathered.
• An email address such as [email protected] is registered and emails are sent to all the webmasters asking to remove their good links.
• When the good links are removed, the quality website loses its position.

The Implications:

In an industry that so often has negative connotations and misinformation surrounding it, any malicious or flagrantly black-hat tactics makes every practitioner look bad. We educate our clients about SEO best practices, and shake the image of SEO as a means for “gaming the system”; these sort of attacks merely undo the hard work we and every other SEO professional does.

More importantly, to clients at least, this example only goes to show that when it comes to business, your competitors might be willing to stoop to nefarious means to sabotage your success. These emails were asking us to remove good, natural backlinks, which would only have negative effects.

So what does this mean for you? You have to be vigilant, and not just from algorithm changes from search engines like Google; now, you not only have to worry about keeping your own tactics legitimate, but you have to be on the lookout for targeted attacks against your efforts from competitors. What is so disturbing about this tactic you cannot really do anything because the target is your good links. Any ideas on how you can fight this tactic?