Negative SEO is an intent to impact your website negatively.
Has your website experienced such unethical SEO attacks?
Has Negative SEO impacted your website?
Some many people and businesses try to undermine their competitors via negative SEO. The result can be a headache and website trouble. Negative SEO is an intent to impact your website negatively. No matter what type of business you manage, it could be something that your website could be affected by. For example, if it sees a sudden drop in traffic, manual penalty notification, or individual keyword ranking.
Some factors that can destroy your website standing:
- An “SEO expert” has used SEO practices known as black hat SEO.
- Our website was copied in 2019 and deployed on several domain names. The result was these domains were also ranking on the exact keywords! The site has been demoted due to scraping the content, copying the whole website, and hosting it under a new domain.
- 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. 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!
Reputable SEO specialists always rely on the best and natural SEO strategies to get websites to rank high and drive quality traffic, NOT unethical and quick SEO schemes.
How to Identify Negative SEO
It’s most likely that you may discover by chance or see that your website traffic drops. The drop can be a big sign that someone or an entity has attacked your website with a negative SEO campaign. Other factors that will impact your website could include:
- Website Traffic Drop: If it’s not a major Google update and you have not used any black hat SEO practices, it’s doubtful your website ranking will suddenly drop. If you follow Google’s SEO guidelines, you should not see your website ranking plummet.
- Google emails you that you’re doing something against their guidelines. If you receive an email from Google, it’s most likely someone has it in for you. There could be many reasons, such as competition, an ex-employee, even an unhappy customer.
- A drop in individual keyword ranking overnight is a clear sign that something is wrong and that negative SEO could be the culprit.
- Your content is suddenly showing up on other websites, which could be harming the web pages and website. There are some measures to take to prevent this. For example, you are controlling and implementing a no index at every page level.
- Backlink issues can affect online visibility, whether it’s an increase in spammy links, blocked links, toxic 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 targets negative SEO. Many tools will help identify, monitor, and prevent negative SEO. In fact, there are many tools available that SEO experts use to monitor website activity. 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, it’s 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 what the root cause is. It could be some other SEO issue. If you feel this is outside your realm, hiring a competent SEO consultant or SEO agency makes sense. After all, they will have a clear understanding and know-how regarding correctly tackling negative SEO.
Originally published at https://visualwebz.com on February 29, 2020.
