Toxic links
A vendor term for backlinks judged harmful by a third-party tool's scoring; Google has repeatedly said it has no such classification and…
Links
Negative SEO
Attempts to damage a competitor's rankings, typically by pointing spam links at their site, scraping their content, or fabricating removal requests.
In full
Google states its systems are designed to disregard links it cannot trust, so link-based negative SEO rarely works against established sites. More consequential vectors are content scraping that competes with the original, malicious DMCA or removal filings, and hacking. Monitoring means watching for sudden link spikes, unexpected index changes, and manual actions rather than reacting to every unfamiliar referring domain.
Example
A site sees 12,000 new links appear from a Russian-language spam network in a week; rankings are unaffected and no action is taken.
Related terms
Disavow links tool
A Search Console tool for asking Google to ignore specified inbound links or domains, intended for sites with a link-related manual action…
Link spam
Google's spam policy category covering links intended to manipulate rankings: buying or selling links, excessive exchanges, automated link…
Manual action
A demotion or removal applied by a human reviewer at Google for a spam policy violation, reported in Search Console with a reconsideration…
Scraped content
Republishing content taken from other sites with no original value added; a spam policy violation and a common source of duplicate-content…