If you thought that the SEO industry is filled with only good and moral people then you couldn’t be more wrong. The search engine optimization industry has a fair share of bad actors and villainous people who prey on their competitor’s website like a predator.
They don’t believe in fair play and bend every possible rule to sabotage your website’s ranking. Welcome to the dark and insidious world of Negative SEO. Although this may sound bit intimidating, but worry not. We will reveal simple preventive measures that will strongly shield your website against such evil predators.
What is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO refers to malicious and unethical tactics deployed mostly by a competitor to undermine or harm another competitor’s website’s overall visibility in search engine result pages.
The essence of negative SEO is to negatively impact the target website’s credibility and reputation. This is mostly done by making your website look spammy or suspicious and thereby deceiving the search engine in triggering retaliatory actions against your website, resulting in downgrading of search engine ranking or attracting manual penalty.
This raises the pertinent question how can any competitor make your website look spammy or suspicious. The answer is ‘black hat techniques.’ For those who are not aware, black hat techniques refers to techniques that violates Google’s guidelines. Therefore, to make your website appear spammy or unreliable, all one needs to do is to associate it with black hat techniques.
This brings us to the next question. How easy or difficult it is to associate any website with black hat techniques. The surprising answer is that it is quite easy. This highlights the fact that nearly all websites are vulnerable to negative SEO.
How Negative SEO is carried out: Common tactics used.
Link spamming:
This is one of the popular tactics that mainly involves creating low quality links at a mass scale for targeting the target website with the malicious intention of triggering penalties from the search engine. Notably, low quality and spammy links can be easily created by using automated software, a technique that clearly violates the Google guidelines.
Apart from automated software, competitors might also use black hat techniques associated specially with link-building. For instance, Google in its guidelines has clearly stated that excessive use of keyword rich anchor text is a black hat technique and this practice could attract penalties for the website. Hence some dishonest and corrupt competitors might deliberately use this technique against the rival website or websites, hoping that Google will duly take note it and punish the website.
Content scraping:
Content scrapping is a process of copying content from a target website and publishing it elsewhere or third-party websites. This is done with the malicious intention of confusing Google, hoping that it will pin the source of plagiarized content to the target website and will punish it by downgrading its keyword rankings. This process is usually carried out with the help of content scrapping software.
Bogus Link Removal Request:
It is all too well known that high-quality backlinks play a massive role in fueling any website’s rise in Google’s SERP. High-quality backlinks are almost like holy grail of the SEO. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that some unscrupulous competitors might invest great amount of time and energy in removing high-quality links from your backlink profile.
But how?
They do this by a method called fake link removal request. In this method, the competitors will contact the host website and request them to remove the link. Competitors obviously have to pretend that they are acting on the behalf of your website, making sure that their activities don’t raise any suspicion.
Hacking and cyberattack:
Hacking, from the context of negative SEO, is all about gaining unauthorized access to a website and then harming the website’s SEO potential.
They can undermine the SEO potential through followingways:
- Deleting content or posting low-quality content across the website.
- Redirecting website URLs to spammy websites.
- Injecting malicious code that can potentially harm the website visitors.
Search engines usually consider websites demonstrating above mentioned behavior as harmful, triggering potential penalties against such websites.
Smear Campaign:
Smear campaign is all about damaging the credibility and reputation of your business by spreading negative perception across the digital landscape. One of the easiest ways to do this is to consistently post and create negative reviews about your business on reputed review websites and across social media platforms.
The ultimate aim of smear campaign is to hurt your website’s organic traffic. As your business’ reputation suffers, less and less people are likely to visit your website.
How to prevent and deal with negative SEO?
Finally, we’ll be talking about how to efficiently deal with sinister and treacherous negative SEO campaign.
Monitor backlinks regularly:
Regularly securitizing your website’s backlink profile will help in detecting any potential abnormalities or problems; whether there have been too many link removals or sudden spike in spammy links.
This should be duly followed with responsive action that will be based mostly on the diagnosis and nature of the problem.
For instance, disavowing toxic links is the best solution if you’ve found that too many spammy links have infiltrated your backlink profile.
You can also contact the concern websites if you found that too many high-quality links are missing from your link profile.
But how to monitor backlinks?
There are many free and paid tools.
- Google Search Console (free tool).
- SEMrush (paid tool).
- Ahrefs (paid tool).
Free tool like Google Search Console offers basic details about your website’s backlinks whereas paid tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs provide refined and in-depth data about backlinks.
Monitor ranking and organic traffic:
Constantly tracking your website’s keyword rankings and organic traffic will help in identifying whether there has been a sudden dramatic drop. If you indeed spot a sudden drop in ranking and traffic then this potentially could be a big red flag that your competitor might be running a negative SEO campaign against your website.
Importantly, regular monitoring of ranking and traffic helps in detecting negative SEO in the very initial stage and ensures faster recovery.
Implement security measures: Strengthening your website’s security will help in keeping hackers and unscrupulous competitors at bay.
Here’s how you can strengthen the security of your website:
- Use strong password (combination of upper case, lower case, alphabets, numbers and special characters) for your website as well as server account.
- Keep changing your website & server account passwords regularly (at least once in six month or once every year).
- Enable two-factor authentication wherever possible for added security.
- Regularly update your website’s software and plug-ins.
- Running a regular technical SEO audit can also help in addressing the security vulnerabilities of your website.
Audit your content:
Regular content audit can help in detecting any possible signs of content scrapping and duplication. You can use tools like Copyspace to detect plagiarized content and make content takedown request wherever possible.
Monitor user behavior:
Monitoring your website’s user behavior will help in identifying any unusual behavior or bot-like activities. Such abnormal activities could be a potential sign that someone might be maliciously targeting your website.
You can use tools like Hotjar and Crazy Egg for behavioral analysis.
Tackle fake review problems:
For identifying fake and malicious reviews, keep regularly assessing review platforms like Google Business Profile and other review websites in your industry.
Make a conscious effort to send request for taking down the fake reviews. You must also try to maintain positive online reputation by encouraging satisfied and happy customers to post positive reviews. This will effectively help in tackling the fake review problem.