You have worked hard on your website and business, but it is a matter of time before your competition may outrank you. It is natural to wonder how you can protect your website. Here we will explain how to watch out for negative SEO.
First off, you must understand what negative SEO is. An SEO company will tell you that this behavior is aimed at a business competition to have them rank lower than what they are now. Some of these tactics are done off-page, such as creating unnatural links, copying content, etc.), while others are done on-page. This is done when someone hacks into your website, making changes to the content on your pages.
There are times when negative SEO is not the culprit for a drop in rankings. These reasons might include a Google algorithm change or lost backlinks.
One off-page negative SEO method is to use link farms. We have all seen many sites that have spammy links on them. While you do not want any spammy links, one or two will probably not hurt your rankings too badly. But there are ways that you can keep tabs on these links. By monitoring your link growth, you will be able to see if there are any high increases over a short period of time. One good place to check this out is SEOSpyGlass.
A second negative SEO strategy that some may use is scraping. Your competition could copy your content, then paste it onto other sites. We all know that search engines are against copy-paste, so this is an easy way for your competition to ruin your site. Google is generally smart enough to know which site was the original source, but if they crawl the site with the copied content first, you may be penalized for it. To help protect yourself, use Copyscape to look for your copied work. Then you may ask the website owner to remove it. Many of them will be in agreement. If they do not agree, file a copyright infringement report.
Let us move on to some on-page negative SEO that an SEO company will tell you to look out for. The first one is to modify the existing content on your page. This can be hard to spot at times. Many will hide it, so you will never notice it unless you look in the code.
A hacker may also redirect your website to theirs. For smaller companies, it usually is not an issue. But if you have high authority, it is an easy way for them to help their own page rank. If Google finds the redirect before you are able to, you may be penalized for redirecting to a malicious site. But you can protect yourself by having website audits with tools such as WebsiteAuditor. This tool will let you see changes that are made that you might not otherwise notice as long as you run it regularly.
You should note that not all hackers have the mindset to hurt your rankings. Regardless, Google does want to be on your side. If they suspect that your website has been hacked, they can put a label on the search engine stating the website may be hacked.
Negative SEO is something that you should watch for with your website. If you are worried about this happening to your website and are in the Tampa, FL, area, consider using an SEO company, such as Affordable SEO Company Tampa.