Negative SEO is NO MYTH and a real concern. Spammers have developed methods that can impact your SEO negatively, often passively.

Have you ever considered that sending emails, such as newsletters, could affect your Google rankings? The answer is yes—it can, and you might be experiencing a ranking decline as a direct result.

How is this possible?

Many businesses use newsletters for repeat business, niche marketing (Seo for trades), and client engagement. However, in an era where spam is still prevalent, antivirus companies, email hosts, and engineers are continuously developing solutions to combat email spam.

Whenever engineers devise a solution, spammers often find new ways to bypass it and continue their spam campaigns.

Today, we’ll explore one method used by spammers that can be particularly harmful to sites focused on online marketing. This guide will help you understand how to protect yourself from becoming a victim.

The Dilemma: High Ranking Draws Attention.

The most serious problem for SEO marketers is that with the improvement of a website’s positioning, there are increasing numbers of spammers who will find and target this website. Spammers are in a position to do backlink profiling, obtain contact details, host information, domain details and more. There are times that they also come into contact with cybercriminals that can access private data.

This of course is not ideal for owners and marketers of both digital and physical assets. There is a need for effort in protecting your online assets not only to prevent access enabling server abuse but also protecting your user details from theft activities of any capacities.

Are you 100% sure your CMS and Server are protected?

What’s the way out? It’s much easier than you may estimate.

Server Hacking Scenario

In this blog however, I will narrow down my scope to one such possible scenario: spammers hacking into your mail server.

I am not going to go into too many details as to how they would do that, however I will list a couple of ideas that are frequently used. You’ll be able to investigate these further as appropriate:

• Direct Server SQL Injections: Accessing the server database using SQL and figuring out how such resources can be misused.
• CMS Vulnerabilities: Getting access to CMS resources and a great example of a CMS is WordPress, DNN, Joomla etc. To locate weakness search for “@vulnerabilities [Your CMS Name].”
• Compromised SMTP Local Machine Passwords: Achieving this by breaking into SMTP passwords stored in local machines.

Understanding these methods makes it easier for you to defend your server and email systems from risks.

If you wish to gain more knowledge about how server access is accomplished or how to protect oneself actively,  don’t hesitate to message me through our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ranknz.

What Comes Next? After Spammers Have Access.

In which case you may ask, why would anyone attack or hack my website or server?

To answer this, we need to take a step back. In the past, what spammers did was either hosted their own private email servers or bought up servers in the cloud to deploy spam. Nevertheless, this has become illegal in most parts of the world today. Maintaining their servers might get them in direct confrontation with law enforcers and renting their services has almost the same consequences.

Despite prevalent abuse in some territories such as Romania and parts of Russia, it is quite common to see that server IPs get blocked very quickly by Google, Hotmail or other email providers. Once the spam score of a server IP address hits a specifc threshold, sending emails that arrive successfully at a desired destination becomes impossible. 

This poses the next question,  why the need to attack me? And this how does this affect my SEO.

Spammers usually go for servers or web hosts with compromised systems or vulnerable backdoors in CMS systems to implement thier spam attack scripts which under normal circumstances would be illegal.

Once such an email server or CMS is hacked, every email generated will have the stamp of the domain and email server. Undetected, this damages the IP and domain reputation, thus affecting your SEO negatively. If your domain gets flagged as spam, you will not only have problems sending and receiving emails, but also generating relevant traffic. This could either make you slowly withdraw from the visible Rank sphere or it could be a rather fast death depending on the nature of the violation and the timing of the detection.

Better to Be Prepared Than Sorry

The best way forward in this case is to ensure that you keep your email server separate from your website server as much as possible. This could mean having two domains or two IP addresses, one is used for your website the other for emails only.

Professional help may be needed to minimize your risks.  

Failure to do this correctly may lead to:

• Spoofing
• Brand hijacking
• Unwanted vulnerabilities

In addition to improving your email campaigns, be certain that you have properly set your DKIM and SPF records. Many websites make this mistake, and neglect these critical measures, exposing their sites to the danger of outside SEO attacks.

These tips apply to paid managed email marketing solutions such as Mailchimp.com which is advised particularly for heavy newsletter users. A quick online search will also provide free and paid alternatives, helping to minimize the risk of damaging your IP reputation.

At RANK, we can safely state that we provide all types of Google Ads management,, email marketing and most interestingly organic SEO services. Increased CTR is guaranteed. Get in touch with us for a free website audit.