The Edward Show The Dark Side of SEO: How Marketers Get Competitors Banned (and How to Protect Yourself)
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Oct 11, 2025 Explore the murky world of negative SEO where cunning marketers knock out competitors without a fair fight. Discover the mechanics of harmful backlinks and how brands can be unfairly banned on platforms like Reddit. Real-life experiments reveal the distressing effectiveness of these tactics, still relevant in 2025. Gain insights into protecting your online presence and learn how to navigate self-promotion safely on Reddit. Equip yourself with knowledge to defend against these sneaky marketing maneuvers.
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Negative SEO Still Works
- Negative SEO is real and can dramatically drop rankings when attackers use large volumes of manipulative exact-match anchor text links.
- Cheap spam links can still trigger algorithmic or manual penalties and severely harm a site's visibility.
Recent Real-World Drops From Attacks
- Edward shares multiple real cases where sites lost rankings due to many exact-match anchor backlinks in 2022 and 2023.
- A Reddit thread also included someone who disavowed thousands of spammy links after noticing the attack.
Defend With A Natural Link Profile
- Build a broad, natural backlink profile with many legitimate links to resist attacks that look manipulative.
- Actively market and earn real links so attackers must expend far more effort to make you appear spammy.
