The Sports Geek defensive SEO and brand protection
This work sits on a less conventional side of SEO: understanding how valuable search properties can be attacked, copied, manipulated or damaged and how to distinguish those problems from ordinary ranking volatility.
Defensive SEO and brand protection
This was a six-month specialist engagement defending The Sports Geek against deliberate attacks: negative SEO, toxic links, canonical attacks, bot scraping, indexing manipulation and abuse of DMCA and Lumen takedown requests.
The SEO challenge
When an established search property loses visibility unexpectedly, conventional explanations such as content quality or Core Web Vitals are not always enough. Defensive SEO requires investigating the wider attack surface.
What I worked on
Negative SEO
Investigation of suspicious or deliberately harmful off-page activity
Backlink attacks
Toxic links and backlink injection detection
Scraping & cloning
Malicious scraping, fraudulent replication and AI-generated cloning
Canonical attacks
Manipulation designed to confuse indexing and canonical signals
Indexing manipulation
Robots, discovery and search-engine indexing attacks
Brand protection
Impersonation, reputation threats and DMCA/Lumen abuse
Results and impact
Working on defensive search has made me better at diagnosing unusual ranking losses because I do not assume every problem originates inside the website itself.
Understanding offensive manipulation improves defensive diagnosis.