Negative SEO: How black hat marketers abuse Google's rules vs toxic backlinks - Rappler

MANILA, Philippines – When online, you’ve probably encountered text or images on web pages which allow you to navigate to other web pages. They’re called hyperlinks.

Hyperlinks tell the user, or other web applications, that more information or data about the subject matter can be found on the other page or online address. The more useful information a page has about a particular subject matter, the more chances it gets to be read and receive more links.

Among digital marketing professionals who practice search engine optimization (SEO), these are called backlinks. And they are worth their weight in gold.

Search engine giants like Google have been known to use these backlinks as one of the signals to gauge the importance of a page in relation to a subject matter. Websites and pages that get a lot of backlinks are placed higher in search engine results pages.

News websites, particularly those that regularly produce updated unique, credible and informative content, rank well in search results because they get a lot of backlinks.

Gaming the system via artificial link building

In contrast, other commercial or marketing websites which do not regularly produce original content on a daily basis have a harder time getting these backlinks.

So how do marketers get around this?

They reach out to high-authority sites in hopes of getting them to link back. Rappler, for example, because it ranks well in results pages, has been receiving many of these requests for years.

In time, wily...

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