There you are cruising along enjoying your new found success with your website when suddenly your sales crash. Your traffic dries up and you can’t figure out why. You do some investigating and you find out some competitor or unhappy customer has spread one complaint or lies after another and the pages they’ve posted to have overrun your popularity on the search engines and your reputation is now in the trash.
This can happen at any time and it calls for efforts of unimaginable resources to correct. It will cost you time, money, and every bit of your wit and cunning to repair. It’s called Negative SEO Remediation.
When your reputation is attacked you have to move fast. The longer you wait the worse things get. Every second other people are reading those reviews and critiques and spreading the word via social media. The danger here is that these negative comments and attacks put down backlinks to your site that says to Google’s algorithm software like GoogleBot to look at your site’s new updates and determine that your site is crooked and not worth the higher ranking you sought for. Enemies do this by grabbing thousands of Black Hat SEO sites and linking them to yours. It can be devastating and for the small and ignorant guy in deep trouble because they can’t all fight back.
To battle this, you’ve got to get your Luke Skywalker on and get into your X-Wing fighter and end those backlinks using tools and techniques like Google’s disavow feature. You’ve got to ask Google to ignore certain sites and keywords. You can use their spam checker too. So it’s you removing links, Google removing links, the people who put up the bad links in the first place start running scared because you can sue them on several counts. As the web gets more sophisticated, we’ll see the options for webmasters to get legal counsel and end this type of sabotage once and for all. Actually, a simple ‘ask’ policy would be effective. If someone wants to link to you, they have to get approval and if you find out their site is rotten later on you can neutralize them directly or through a proxy like Google.
These offensive tactics will take some time so don’t try to imagine it’ll happen overnight. Google has to see what your site’s changes are and then move them up the search engine ranks at their pace.
Vigilance is the key here. You’ll need Google’s webmaster tools to help you combat this problem now and in the future. You’ll need 24/7 monitoring for any significant changes on your web pages. Load times, response times when interacting and more. This could mean a massive amount of links being added toward your site it’s causing less than optimal performance. Here you’ll have some tools to help but you need to keep a weather eye out yourself because computers can’t always find those
‘out of the box’ strategies that some of these evil saboteurs employ.
These are the hazards while sailing along the internet. Your website, like a boat, will find fair weather and good ports, but sometimes there will be that rocky shore and in this case, the submarines of sabotage that you didn’t see coming. You’ll have to drop depth charges of truth via Google and then wait for the oil to float to the top knowing the sabotagers are dead in the water.
When trouble like this arises, don’t despair, there’s hope but it’s gonna cost some time and money but in the end, you’ll be fortified against further attacks and ready to take on the web a new.