Oftentimes it’s more of a challenge to get on top than it is to stay there, regardless of whether you’re talking about sports or SEO. When it comes to the search engines, this is what every business wants but not every business can get it. Unfortunately, some businesses will resort to unscrupulous means when this happens – things like negative SEO.
Defining Negative SEO
Some competitors will do anything possible to try to get your hard-earned position on purpose. They’ll do this by trying to have your site penalized. Although this can’t be done on-page, there are many off-page methods they can use to negatively impact your website.
Off-Page Factors Commonly Used in Negative SEO
Three of the many negative SEO practices your competition may use against you and for which you must be on the lookout for include:
Spammy inbound links: This is the most commonly seen practice because it’s easy to have another website listed on a terrible website like a link farm. With just a few of these links a person’s website will plummet in the SERPs and the owner probably won’t even know why unless you use a tool like AHREFS to watch your inbound link profile and immediately disavow anything that looks suspicious.
Duplicate content or content that’s been scraped: Someone may steal your copywritten content so they can rank better. You can use CopyScap to monitor for this type of plagiarism.
Affiliate hijacking: There are many different ways in which this can occur – some so fast you may barely notice it when you click on the website’s link. This is because a series of Javascript redirects are being used to redirect your website’s visitors elsewhere. Obviously, this isn’t something you want to have happen to your website because you’re losing traffic, but you’re also not having the purchases that come through your organic search results credited to your account. Unfortunately, if you don’t catch this soon enough, it could honestly cost you thousands of dollars. While you’d think this wouldn’t happen too often, it happens more often than you’d believe because the only way to monitor this is by closely watching your analytics and affiliate tracking. If you see affiliate traffic coming from organic search, this is a red flag.
Hacking your website: Any type of hacking that happens to your website will have a negative impact on it. This is especially true with Google who will de-rank your website or, at the very least, they will put up a warning telling your visitors that your website has been ranked.
Improving Your Website
Here at the Affordable SEO Company we not only understand the horrible impact that negative SEO can have on you, but also the importance of doing something about it. Being proactive is better than being reactive but both require a great amount of time on your behalf. We’re here to make the work easier on you by doing it for you like we’ve successfully done for many clients over the year so make sure you contact us today.