There have been some major developments in SEO Industry that have changed the direction of the SEO in the past two years. The black hat SEO is not only difficult to implement but also less likely to deliver results. This is the reason SEO Industry witnessed a new type of SEO which is “Negative SEO”.
This has created a new trend in the SEO market that is waving the competition onto a negative conundrum. This negative SEO is unethical and prone to sportsmanship type any dialect. It is an unethical and highly negatively drawn SEO campaign that is used by webmasters who have no idea about how to enhance SEO ranking. This is the reason they defame the competitor’s website as they have no idea to uplift their own.
In this post, I am going to give you a lesson about the Negative SEO and the ways to identify and prevent them on your website.
Let’s get started,
What Is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO, as the name suggests, implements black hat SEO practices on the other competitor’s websites. Basically, negative SEO is one of the practices that is done to sabotage one’s website’s SEO campaign. This is done by either spammy link farms, duplicate content or fake reviews or even hacking your website to remove the important backlinks from other high DA websites.
Let’s have a glance at what these negative SEO techniques can do.
- Hacking your website
- Spammy link farms
- Content duplicacy of your website
- Creating fake social media profiles to defame you
- Removing the best backlink you have
- Pointing links to your websites with anchor text such as Viagra, Poker etc.
So, these are the methods that can be used against your website and this is where you must worry about. How do you stop these kinds of attacks? Well, you can’t. You cannot stop these kinds of attacks as they are done by unethical personalities which will stop at no cost. However, you can prevent it by paying some extra attention.
Perform Link Audits On Regular Basis
You must have heard about prevention is better than cure. This is the same thing with this point. Links audit is a good healthy lifestyle a website owner can adopt. This makes sure that if anyone is attempting negative SEO on your website, then you would know it before the damage is too prone to repair.
The main indication there will be a sudden spike or a sudden down. This will give you certain red flags to worry about negative SEO.
If you are hacked, then your hacker would make some changes that will make your website vulnerable to spammy link alteration. The negative SEO attacks are very hard to detect which is why regular link audits will help you to detect any sudden change that can be a potential threat to you and your business.
Beware Of Content Scraping
This is one of the simplest ways to defame the competitor’s website. The negative SEO can be easily done by copying the content of the website and then posting it in as many as linking sites as they can to decrease the authority level of the website.
This leads us to the conclusion that things are very much worse for your website as your website prone to lose your ranking in search engine. So, make use of Copyscape and make sure that none of your content is copied to another website without your permission.
Keep An Eye On The Site Speed
You all know that the website’s speed is a key ranking factor. When you started observing that your website starts moving slow and you cannot find any specific reason for that, then you may assume that something is wrong with the crawling software.
This is a clear indication that there is some issue as forceful crawling always causes website speed issues. Forceful crawling can cause heavy server load, which will increase the page load time or even crash the entire server of your website.
If you are feeling these experiences, then contact your hosting service provider and take their help to determine the reason for the slow speed.
Observe The Keyword CTR
There was this famous case where a website owner starts getting hits and then a sudden bounce. This increase the bounce rate to 80-100percent. This signifies the bad user experience which in results returns with poor Search Engine Rankings.
To avoid such insidious attacks you need to observe the CTR of your keywords. This will give you an idea why this is happening on your website and then you can report it to Google. This will solve this grave issue of your website.
Upgrade Website Security
Till now you must have understood that there are too many flaws that can affect your website. However, the security of your website is the most paramount factor that can really put your website down.
You need to keep your website secure and firm in order to prevent such attacks on your website. Migrate your website to HTTPS in order to avoid any kind of security certificate issue.
Google has flagged compromised websites as “This site may be hacked”. This hence will affect your website’s SEO. So make sure that you do secure your website efficiently.
Winding It Up
So, these are the points that are very valuable and you must prevent these type of things. Prevention is always better than cure and you must prevent the mishap of negative SEO with your website. Just to make sure, let’s go through the five points I made for you to detect and prevent negative SEO.
- Links audit is a good healthy lifestyle a website owner can adopt. This makes sure that if anyone is attempting negative SEO on your website, then you would know it before the damage is too prone to repair.
- The website’s speed is a key ranking factor. When you started observing that your website starts moving slow. This is a clear indication that there is some issue as forceful crawling always causes website speed issues.
- The negative SEO can be easily done by copying the content of the website and then posting it in as many as linking sites as they can to decrease the authority level of the website.
- Observe the CTR of your keywords. This will give you an idea why this is happening on your website and then you can report it to Google.
- The security of your website is the most paramount factor that can really put your website down. You need to keep your website secure and firm in order to prevent such attacks on your website.
I hope my article serves the purpose to help you. If there is any problem regarding negative SEO or website security. Mention that in comments and I will look into that. Till then, have a great day ahead.
