Negative SEO

Negative SEO is an intent to negatively impact your website. No matter what type of business you manage it could be something that your website could be impacted by. For example, if it sees a sudden drop in traffic, manual penalty notification or individual keyword ranking. This is generally down to a number of factors that can destroy your website standing:

· An “SEO expert” has used SEO practices known as black hat SEO.

· The site has been demoted due to scraping the content, and in some cases copying the whole website, and hosting it under a new domain. In fact, our website was copied over a year ago and deployed on several domain names. The result was these domains were also ranking on the same keywords!

· Spammy links. The process where thousands of low-quality links are directed to your website.

· Fake reviews, and even in some cases where competitors are reviewing and recommending their own business.

· The website has been hacked and redirected to other sites.

Does Googles Care when it comes to Negative SEO

Though Google tries its best to prevent such SEO practices, there will always be loopholes for unethical SEO, and ways to target and compromise the SEO algorithms. In fact, if someone or a competitor's mission is to harm your website standing they will not own up to it. Even, if you reach out to them!

How to Identify Negative SEO

Its most likely, that you may just discover by chance, or if you see that your website traffic just drops. The drop can be a big sign that someone or entity has attacked your website with a negative SEO campaign. Other factors that will impact your website could include:

1. Website Traffic Drop: If its not a major Google update, and you have not used any black hat SEO practices, it's very unlikely your website ranking will suddenly drop. In fact, if you follow Google’s SEO guidelines you should not see your website ranking plummet.
2. Google emails you that you're doing something against their guidelines. If you receive an email from Google, its most likely someone has it in for you. There could be many reasons, such as competition an ex-employee, even an unhappy customer.
3. A drop in individual keyword ranking overnight is a clear sign that something is wrong, and that negative SEO could be the culprit.
4. Your content is suddenly showing up on other websites which could be harming the web pages and website. There are a number of measures to take in preventing this. For example, controlling and implementing a no index at every page level.
5. Backlink issues can effect online visibility. Whether it's an increase in spammy links, blocked links or a drop in your backlinks. It's always good to regularly monitor such fluctuations and take action when negative SEO is spotted.

Tools that help Discover & Monitor Negative SEO

It's not the end of the world, especially if your website is the target of negative SEO. In fact, there are many tools available that SEO experts use to monitor website activity. There are many tools that will help identify, monitor and prevent negative SEO. Such as Google Webmaster Tools, SEMRush, Ahref and Moz to name a few.

What to do if your website has been impacted by Negative SEO

If you’ve discovered that your website is affected by this practice its best to stay calm and be collective. The damage may have been done, but you need to be in the salvage and recover mode. Don’t panic! The first step is to investigate and understand whats the cause of this. It could be some other SEO issue. If you feel this is outside of your realm, it just makes sense to hire a competent SEO consultant or SEO agency like Visualwebz. After all, we have a clear understanding and know-how when it comes to how to correctly tackle negative SEO.

First appeared on https://visualwebz.com/negative-seo-what-is-it/