Negative SEO: What You Should Know
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Whichever search engine optimization techniques you use, it's important to take precautions to protect yourself from negative SEO.Negative SEO, also known as Black Hat SEO, is a tactic where unscrupulous people manipulate search results to push your website down in the rankings or get it kicked off the search engines altogether. Here is what you need to know:
At its core, negative SEO is when a competitor attempts to damage your website's organic rankings by building bad backlinks to your site. This can be done in several ways, such as:
Unfortunately, this practice is fairly common and difficult to detect. There are several ways to help protect yourself from these attacks if you fall victim.
It would be best to worry about negative SEO because it's a real threat to your business. If someone can successfully launch a negative SEO attack against you, they can bring your website down by:
-Sending spammy links to your site to get you penalized by Google; -Creating content around the same keywords and pushing the original content down in the SERPs; -Sending fake DMCA takedown requests for copyrighted images on your site; or -Stealing your content and ranking for it on their websites pushes you off the first search results page.
In other words, if someone finds an exploit in your online presence, they can hurt you and even put you out of business.
If you are not using Google Search Console, it's time to start. Google Search Console is a free service that allows web admins to monitor their website or blog performance in the organic search results of Google. You can connect to your website and start seeing traffic data immediately.
One of the features is traffic from search queries, which will show you the keywords bringing people to your site. With this information, you will see if there has been a decrease in traffic due to negative SEO.
If you notice a drop in traffic with no other explanation, such as a dip in quality links or content issues on the pages that rank for your targeted terms, then it may be due to negative SEO (or another issue). If you have an analyticsprogram installed on your site (Google Analytics is free for websites), look at your overall trending data for any sharp drops over time.
In this section of the handbook, you'll get a rundown on protecting your site from being penalized by Google's search engine—also known as negative SEO. This is a growing trend in the industry, and while not everyone is affected by it, it's wise to be aware of these risks to take steps to protect yourself.
Google offers users an amazing tool called Google Search Console. It's more commonly known as Webmaster Tools, but they changed the name in 2015. This is still where you have to go to identify and fix many issues with your websites, including identifying and fixing negative SEO attacks.
When you get attacked, you should head over to Google Search Console and look at your backlinks: Identify Spammy Backlinks Using Google Search Console. Google has set up an official guide for dealing with this issue.
What should you do to deal with negative SEO? Once you've identified the links causing the problem, start contacting the site's web admins and asking for link removal. If this doesn't work, you can use Google's disavow tool to remove those links. Experts suggest that you start monitoring your backlinks regularly so you can spot and solve them right away.
Negative SEO is a deeply unsettling practice, and you want to avoid it. If you're operating a site, be on the lookout for negative SEO and make certain that you protect your site as best you can. Because it's still unclear how
Google will handle negative SEO in its search results, you can use a service like Vazoolathat monitors your site and gets rid of toxic backlinks.
