Three Negative SEO Tactics Demote Rival Gaming Sites in Google SERPs

Across high-stakes gaming SERPs, three negative SEO tactics demote or remove rival pages and domains from Google.

Alban Febrer reports that across two years in the gaming vertical, competing operators ran daily disruption campaigns far beyond the toxic backlinks seen in CBD — prompting the publishing house to wonder whether rivals maintained a dedicated negative SEO department.

First, competitors report a target page's content to Google as obsolete.

Google's system then judges that the page lacks sufficient content refreshes and removes the URL from the SERP, though whether Google has since patched the flaw remains unconfirmed.

Separately, competitors launch DDoS floods against target sites on Friday evenings at 4:00 PM or 6:00 PM Thailand time.

Rival operators time the disruption for 6:00 PM on Friday when staff leave the office, letting the DDoS traffic run unchecked over the weekend while no one monitors the site and causing the target pages to lose Google rankings.

Additionally, while rotating in-house teams can restore individual pages hit by standard DMCA complaints during staff vacations, competitors targeting a recent company escalated to server-level DMCA notices.

Instead of flagging individual URLs, rivals sent DMCA complaints to the hosting server to strike entire domain names — a tactic Febrer would not deploy, leaving targeted operators with no defense when high-budget gaming competitors target top-earning queries.