Tips to Protect Your Site From Negative SEO (Harsh)

The competitive industry of SEO or Search Engine Optimization has made rapid progress in the current times. An in-depth understanding of it is crucial for businesses to increase their website traffic and brand awareness. Today, online marketers are adopting dramatically informed strategies to rank high in Google and other search engine platforms. Nothing is as easy as it was three years ago.

However, this field has its own loopholes too, like the existence of negative SEO, which is a legitimate danger for all. Since Black Hat SEO is hard to operate and execute, the rise of the Negative Website SEO is uncontrolled. It has the power to sabotage a website, creating other substantial staggering losses. This way, it has become one of the most defining challenges of our time.

What is Negative SEO?

It refers to the implementation of the techniques of Black hat SEO, withholding the potential of incapacitating the competitor website’s ranking on search engines. A disgruntled competitor probably undertakes this malicious attempt, as these attacks are detrimental to the site.

There are different types of Negative SEO –

Hacking the website/Gambling

Attaching toxic backlinks to the website

Scrapped Content or Content Duplication

Use of indecent keywords

Creating fake social media profile or handles

However, Google’s release of the ‘Penguin Algorithm’, in the year 2007, has enabled online marketers to put a restraint on harsh, negative SEO by a huge extent. It directly penalizes websites that adopt manipulative means for link building. The ‘disavow tool’ by Google also warns site owners about malicious and troubled links.

All these upgrades have brought to the forefront those websites, which use shady means to manipulate Google rankings. Although Black Hat SEO is fading, the tactics surrounding Negative SEO continues to stay under strong focus.

The danger is real – Negative SEO. The tech master, Neil Patel says that if you conduct a detailed search on Fiverr for the term “negative SEO”, there will be over 15000 results of people offering to do your job for just $5. It can completely tamper weeks and months of your hard work related to the website performance anomalies and ranking.

Other than that, you can get the EV SSL certificate to gain more authority for the website.

So, here is what you should do to avoid falling prey to it. Website security is of core importance, to remain safe and free from spam backlinks and negative reviews. Here are some authentic measures that you can adopt.

1. Performing Regular Audits for Backlinks

The way spammers go about with Negative SEO is by building low quality, bad links for the website. This is why performing daily backlink audits is necessary to thwart all the SEO attacks. Once you check and monitor the daily profile growth, your site stays protected against detrimental, unforeseen hacks. This can be challenging, but not impossible. This way, you can quickly identify all the necessary triggers and suspicious links for a cyber attack.

Use reliable tools like Ahrefs or Serpstat for best results concerning backlink health.

2. Search Duplicate Content

Prevention of content scraping should be prioritized to avoid the pitfalls of Negative SEO. Remove plagiarized content to avoid indexing on junk domains. This way, your website linked to Ecommerce SEO will not lose its value.

Also, for easy detection, you can utilize reliable software like Copyscape or Grammarly to check existing content on the website. Consequently, you can mail the webmaster to remove the content immediately.

Even distribution of content is also necessary, across other viable websites too.

3. Looking for Slumps in Traffic

If your website undergoes an explained drop in traffic, it is the result of unethical SEO practices. Use Google Analytics to find out what is actually causing your website to slow down. Google is a professional when it comes to detecting negative SEO. It tracks visitors, paying attention to your paid advertisements, emails and other channels as well.

Forceful crawling can cause crashes due to high load on the server. Your job is to find the perpetrators by yourself.

Use the following tools –

• Website Grader by HubSpot

• GTMetrix

• PageSpeed Insight by Google

• Page Speed Optimization Tool by Varvy

4. Check GMB

If the concerned business is registered with Google My Business, you should be extra careful about spammers infiltrating your work with negative reviews. Online brand building is crucial for long-lasting customer loyalty and reputation.

Notice any fake reviews? Report them immediately.

• First, conduct an extensive search of the business on Google Maps

• Select your own business from the thousands of results

• Click your mouse on ‘Reviews’

• Flag all the fake, inappropriate reviews

• Lastly, fill out the detailed report form

The same goes for negative reviews on social media handles too.

5. Set Email Alerts

This is useful whenever –

• You receive a manual penalty from Google

• You have server connectivity issues The Pages are non-indexed

• There is a malware attack

You can also set alerts if you are using the Google Search Console. The leveraged utilization of it will monitor the safety of the website automatically.

6. Password Protection

Improvement Security of the website is crucial. This is why you should know the techniques of strengthening your website through the creation of a strong password. You should focus on two main areas –

• 
  

• Generate powerful passwords with the right sequences of letters, numbers and symbols

• Two-factor authentication plugin

Also, keep backups of the website to boost security. This way, you can restore your assets whenever needed.

CONCLUSION

Negative SEO is indeed very harmful. Hence, prior preparation is the best medicine to tackle it. Although the aftermath and its scopes depend on various preconditions, constantly checking your website performance through the means of rightful tools will ensure that the negative results bounce back. Learning from these experiences is good, but you should never allow it to turn into a reality.