Impact Of Negative SEO On Your Website’s Rankings

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.

How Important Are Customer Reviews For Seo?

Why Customer Reviews Are Important for SEOIn order to have a happy life, you shouldn’t care that much about what people say about you. But when it comes to online businesses, this actually matters way more than you can imagine.

Besides trying to come up with new SEO ideas, in order to build some high-quality links and help your website rank well, you should also keep an eye on its day-to-day performance. Specifically, we’re talking about research, product development, sales fulfillment, or even customers service.

Forgetting about these aspects or even not caring about them that much can lead to a series of negative customer reviews, which can make you lose potential customers and even hinder your rankings.

Let’s take a few moments and understand how reviews can affect your SEO efforts, in both negative and positive ways.

They are actually user-generated content!

Just think about it: while you’re trying to integrate some specific keywords into your content, many of them feel very natural to the users who use them in reviews. And Google is seeing them as signals, therefore noticing your online presence.

Whether we’re talking about general keywords in your niche or long-tails, they are all necessary for your SEO strategy. Good reviews can take your ranking scores a bit higher, while negative reviews will bring you down if you are not careful.

They help you compete in your market!

Besides affecting your SERP rank, customer reviews can also affect your overall market performance.
Specifically, when somebody searches for a term in your niche, a list of results will be displayed. Some results have customer reviews, while some of them don’t.  Let’s take things logically: won’t you be tempted to check out the result with reviews, as It looks legit?

It was proven that people are more likely to trust an online business with a mix of reviews, whether they are positive or negative. By displaying these, a company shows that it’s far from being perfect, not to mention that it somehow guarantees that the reviews are real!

They provide a lot of value for local SEO campaigns!

When a user leaves a review, which contains local references, your local SEO efforts receive an unexpected boost. This review is a small piece of organic content, after all. The more you get, the stronger your presence will be in Google’s eyes.
The more positive customer reviews integrating local terms you’re competing for, the better for your business.

They help you establish a relationship with clients

When somebody wants to buy something online, Google offers the information about the product or service they are after, giving the best possible options available. As for customer reviews, these are real deal sealers.

Some people like to go through a couple of reviews before making the final decision, so it’s obvious that what past customers have to say matters a lot. Their opinion makes your business feel genuine and if the reviews are good, potential new clients want to feel the same thing.

Make sure you always answer the reviews, including negative ones, as you will help people know you better.

Keeping up with all reviews can be a bit overwhelming sometimes. If you want to build relationships with your clients, but also improve your presence in Google, SEO Jacksonville is here to help. Competitive search engine optimization packages, able to help you make a difference for your business, are just one call away, at (904) 425-9679.

How to Prepare for Negative SEO

How to Prepare for Negative SEONegative SEO is actually real and you need to be able to combat it if you’re going to make the most of your online presence. There is always going to be business out there that are shady, and that means that they’ll go to extreme means in order to turn a profit. This means that negative SEO is going to be an important part of any shady business protocol, mainly because it takes away from competitors. When somebody hits you with negative SEO you’re going to realize it, you’ll start to lose your rankings and Google will begin to hit you with certain penalties. Google is always looking for certain traits regarding websites that are going to have an effect on their rankings, mainly because they’re trying to keep everything on an even playing field when it comes to rankings and such.

Negative SEO is usually a last resort to some people, but certain online marketers take it upon themselves to blast competition out of the water before they’ve even set up a website. It’s ridiculous and it’s definitely dishonest, but there are tons of dishonest people on this planet (and it’s going to stay that way for as long into the future as we can see).

Does It Work?

Negative SEO does in fact work, and you need to be cautious when dealing in certain industries online. Adult affiliate offers are one of those things that can either make or break you when it comes to online marketing, especially since most of the other people within the industry have no problem when it comes to being non-reputable. If you don’t take care of the negative SEO being thrown at you there’s not only going to be a drop in revenue, but there will also be a drop in activity altogether when it comes to your website. The competition is always going to try and gain an upper hand on you, and even though negative SEO that’s actually impactful is quite rare it’s still possible. They can apply the tactic through an abundance of means, usually through spammy backlinks and hidden text on webpages that will ultimately derank your website, but those are only a few of the things that you need to worry about.

Not every single random backlink you see is going to be “bad” in a sense, but if you didn’t set it up you should definitely take a look at it. Sitewide links aren’t always going to be bad as well, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t attempt to look deeper into that as well. Some people will even go as far as hacking into a business website just to conduct a little bit of negative SEO, it sounds like drastic measure but your ranking on Google is actually worth quite a bit of cash.

Keep yourself safe and look deeper into anything that could be even remotely similar to negative SEO, and trust me, you’ll be happy that you did in the long run.

Has Your Website Been Affected by Negative SEO?

negative-seo-005For beginners, the negative SEO is a technique which can be applied towards a website with the intent to downgrade a website search engine ranking. The negative SEO had been invented a while ago and recently has been successfully used to bring website ranking down due to mostly Google search engine algorithms becoming more sensitive to unnatural links and other negative signals.

The good thing is that Google provides the remediation tool which is far from being perfect but allows with significant amount of work to remediate the negative and unnatural links created for your website. Using the Google DISAVOW links tool you should be able to submit a list of links or domains to Google which should discount these links from being used to calculating a website ranking,

Read a good post on the negative SEO here…