How to Protect Against Negative SEO

How to Protect Against Negative SEONegative SEO is not only real, it’s powerful enough to destroy a website through its use of aggressive spamming and malicious backlinks. When these black hat techniques are implemented against your website, you’re faced with a legitimate danger that could result in you losing both organic search visibility and revenue.

Counteracting a Negative SEO Attack

With a little diligence you can catch these attacks before they cause irreparable harm to your website. To do so you must:

  • Perform link audits on a routine basis: This will be your savior if you’re ever the victim of a negative SEO attack because it’ll allow you to spot suspicious activity before it spirals out of control. Watch for any sudden, huge spikes or drops, especially when you haven’t been working on link building.
  • Watch your site’s speed: This is an important ranking factor when it comes to Google. When your website is acting sluggish and you don’t know why, you should use crawling software to see if there’s anything suspicious happening. If you’re having a problem and can’t figure out why, more than likely you’re the victim of forceful crawling – something that’ll create a heavy server load, slowing your website down and possibly even causing it to crash.
  • Be on the lookout for scraped content: Over the past few years content marketing has grown in importance. Unfortunately, this isn’t an area that everyone is skilled in though. This has caused a rise in scraping – someone taking content from your website and pasting it on theirs. This has serious consequences when discovered. It can cause your content to be devalued and your website to fall in the SERPs. Copyscape and Google’s Copyright Removal form are your best allies here.
  • Monitor Google My Business: While the occasional negative review will happen, when you get a bunch of them at once, it’s probably a negative SEO attack. When this happens, you must act fast to prevent your reputation from being damaged. To flag and report these reviews you should look for your business on Google Maps, click on your business, click review summary, and flag the fake ones. Make sure you also fill out the report form.
  • Monitor your keywords’ CTR: User experience plays an important role when it comes to Google’s SERPs. If someone programs a bot to land on the competitions’ websites that are ranking well for these keywords then immediately bounce away from it again this will increase their bounce ratio and decrease their ranking in the SERPs.
  • Pay attention to where you’re at in the SERPs: When you notice a drop in ranking or complete de-indexing (something that rarely happens) you’ll want to see what’s happened. For a full review of how your site is performing you should use rank tracking software. Sudden drops here should encourage you to look and make sure your robots.txt file is still properly set up.
  • Make sure your website’s security is up-to-date: The number of cyberattacks grows yearly. You need to have applied all your software’s security patches and make sure your CMS software has powerful encryption to protect your site from such attacks. It’s also important to use HTTPS if your site has any sensitive customer information on it. Doing so will also help you in the SERPs. Doing your best to protect your site will ensure that Google doesn’t flag it as being compromised – something that will definitely ensure a hefty dip in your traffic.

Before you’re faced with a negative SEO attack, hire the Affordable SEO Company to handle your website for you. They’ve done this successfully for many companies over the years. You should call and put them to work for you today.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *