Tag Archives: Negative SEO

Impact Of Negative SEO On Your Website’s Rankings

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what negative SEO isAlthough your website’s chances of a negative SEO target are low, the consequences are enormous. You might wonder how easily a competitor can ruin your rankings or how you may protect your website? However, before answering them, you need to understand what negative SEO is.

It stands for a range of activities that aims to lower a competitor’s rank in search results. It is primarily an off-page strategy that might involve building unnatural links to a website or reposting and scrapping its content. Some cases also include hacking or modifying content on a website. But any sudden drop in ranking doesn’t always mean that it’s the case of Negative SEO. Hence, before concluding that a competitor has hurt your rankings, it’s important to factor out the common reasons for the drop. Below we have compiled a list of all such possibilities.

Negative Off-Page SEO

The strategy primarily targets a website without any internal interferences. Some common types of negative off-page SEO are discussed below.

Link farms
A few spammy links don’t hurt your site’s rankings. But negative SEO attacks mostly involved building links from multiple interconnected websites or link farms. Most links use the exact anchor text and are often unrelated to the website under attack. Some might include a niche keyword to make it appear as if the owner of the website is trying to manipulate.

You cannot prevent such attacks, but it’s easy to reverse the damage they might do if you regularly spot them. You have to constantly monitor the link profile growth by using tools like SpyGlass, which generates progress graphs with a list of links in your profile and referring domains. If you notice an unusual spike in any of the two, you should investigate immediately.

Scraping
Competitors may scrape content from your website and use it on other websites to ruin your rankings. If Google finds duplicated content across websites, it would only pick a single version amongst them all. Google is smart enough to identify the original piece unless it considers any stolen performance first. Scrapers are smart and often copy and post new content right after publishing it on your website.

Using Copyscape can help in determining all instances of content duplication. In case you find scraped copies, it is advised to contact the webmaster and ask them to remove the content. If this doesn’t help, you should report it by using Google’s copyright infringement Report option.

Forceful crawling
Another way where competitors try to crash a website by forcefully crawling it and leading to a heavy server load. If Googlebot fails to access your website on several attempts in a row, your content might get de-ranked. To be safe, you should observe if your website has become slow or shows unavailable. Contact the hosting company and ask them to investigate and help you solve the issue.

Negative on-page SEO

Implementing negative on-page SEO attacks is very difficult as it involves hacking and changing your website’s content, codes, or settings. Hackers may modify your content, redirect your pages to suspicious links or malicious websites, etc. Staying safe against such situations requires conducting regular audits using tools like WebSite Auditor.

Getting Your Website De-Indexed
Minor changes to the robots.txt file can drastically impact the SEO strategy that you have been implementing. For instance, a simple disallow rule is enough for Google to ignore a website completely.

To stay protected, you need to check your rankings regularly. It helps in knowing if your website got de-indexed. Rank Tracker is one such tool that allows you to perform scheduled automatic checks daily or weekly. Any sudden drops in your rankings are shown separately in Dropped note in the difference column.

Hacking A Website
If a website is hacked and the hacker doesn’t have any negative SEO in mind, such attacks can drastically hurt the SEO. Google intends to protect its users, and if they suspect a website has been hacked, they might de-rank it.

Besides the strategies mentioned above, beefing up the security of your website should always be on your list of priorities. If you think it’s hard for you to deal with Negative SEO, you should reach out to experts for assistance in protecting your website and remediating negative SEO. Local SEO Jacksonville company in Jacksonville, FL is an expert in such strategies and has been assisting clients in staying protected from the effects of negative SEO.

Guidelines on safeguarding your site from black hat SEO

Posted on by · 3 min read

Safeguarding from Risky Black Hat SEO TechniquesNegative SEO has been discussed animatedly and has been in the news of late. But what exactly is it? And to what extent does it prevail? Are there enough valid reasons to be worried about negative or black hat SEO? In case your website is broken into and hacked using negative SEO techniques, what steps can you take to restore your portal and preempt as well as prevent such malicious attacks in the future?
This blog takes you through the guidelines you have to follow in order to safeguard your site from the damaging aspects of a SEO strategy. But first let us familiarize you with the common features of a negative SEO campaign.

Defining Negative SEO

Negative SEO usually implies unscrupulous tactics that a hacker or an aggressive competitor of yours resorts to for bringing down your site’s ranking on SERPs or search engine results pages. Negative methods of search engine optimization also referred to as black hat SEO has to do with infiltrating and sabotaging a website by stationing innumerable spam links to the portal. Owing to the harmful impacts of such stratagems, the affected site’s ranking takes a beating and the site eventually loses quality traffic.
Instead of waiting for the hacker or the jealous competitor to bring down your portal, it’d be better on your part to thwart such spiteful attempts much before they cause heavy damage.

1. Keep Regular Watch On The Speed with Which Your Site Loads
The speed with which your portal loads on the browser is a significant ranking parameter. In case, the loading of your site is inordinately delayed on a regular basis, there is good reason to suspect that your site has become a victim of negative SEO. Thereafter, when you take the help of crawling software to detect what you have been suspicious of all along but cannot trace anything but your site loading is delayed, then you can be sure that your site has been.

If you are technically competent, you can weed out the culprits on your own or else you have to fall back on your web hosting service or the webmaster.

2. Carry out Link Audits Routinely
Carrying out link auditing frequently not only contributes towards improving the ranking of your site on Google’s or Yahoo’s SERPs (search engine results pages) but also helps in screening out links to unauthorized portals. If your site is linking to quality backlinks, the graphs and flow charts for ‘backlink progress’ and ‘linking domains’ will have a more or less smooth gradient. But if you espy a steep drop or spike in the slopes, then there is a good possibility that your site has been hacked into. Either conduct an audit manually or take advantage of auditing software app.

3. Weed out Negative Reviews
You could lose quality traffic due to a deluge of negative reviews loaded on your site by a malicious competitor. Find your business listing on Google Maps, select the listing, and click on review summary> reviews, flag the fake negative feedbacks, and complete the report form.

4. Be on the Lookout for Scraped Content
It could happen that your original content is lifted word by word by a hacker and posted on his or her site that gets reviewed by Google before yours. Use a Copyscape software to find out if your content has been plagiarized.

5. Keep a Tab on Click through Rate of Your Keywords
Review your keywords’ CTRs using Google Search Console and if you spot an inordinate spike, report the matter to Google and start disowning the bad links.

6. Keep Checking Your SERP Ranking Once in a While
Although this goes without saying, you need to check your SERP rank routinely just to make sure that your site’s ranking is at least maintained. Make the most of tracking software to check the site’s visibility across the net.

7. Ensure That Your Security Arrangements are updated periodically
Make sure that all your security arrangements are up to date. For instance, ensure that your site is stationed on a server that uses SSL encryption technology.