SEO is a long process. If you have done it properly, you know how much time and effort is needed to become visible in SERPs. Unfortunately, some people don’t want to play fair working on their SEO. Instead, they are aiming in destroying yours.
Negative SEO are unethical practices conducted mostly to get rid of competition. Your rivals may hire hackers which will attack your site. Rebuilding your site after attack is a very long process. It is easier to prevent possible attack, than to handle its consequences. In this article we will describe some of the most common negative SEO techniques and give you tips on how to protect you website. Let’s have a look.
- Slowing down your website
Hackers achieve it by implementing forceful crawling of your website. In some cases, it may even cause your website to crash. Use Google Analytics to observe any changes in traffic and in this case, especially your CTR (click through rate), which reflects the time users spends on your web site.
If users leave your website quickly it might be because they are discouraged to stay on it due to its loading speed. If you identify the issue quickly, there is a higher chance that your traffic reduction wouldn’t be significant.
- Toxic links
Your competitors may link to your website from toxic websites or even access your website and implement toxic links there. They can also link your site to the linkfarms which will suggest Google bots that you are using black hat SEO techniques. You can’t really prevent people to linking to your website form toxic sources but what you can do is, again, observe.
If you see recent spike in your website backlinks and traffic it may indicate that your site is under attack. Any unnatural growth not connected to your actions or content is suspicious. The best solution in this case is to use some tools. You can use SEMrush to perform backlinks audit, see the toxicity of your link and delete them.
- Stealing your content
Your content may get plagiarized and posted on multiple websites. It is possible that due to the number of servers which contains your content, Google will index some of them before your website.
This will cause Google to perceive the first indexed server as an original source of your content, therefore penalizing all other websites – including yours. In order to prevent it you should often use plagiarism detecting tools. If you find out that somebody has stolen your content, you can either ask the webmaster to remove it or contact Google directly.
- Giving you bad review
This action can be especially destructive for local SEO. Small, local businesses rely on reviews heavily. After all, who would visit barber shop with average review of one star and some pretty bad comments connected to it?
Basically, it is dangerous for any business without a solid brand image. If people don’t already have an opinion about your company, they will simply count on others. Fake bad reviews are very immature and simple way of negative SEO; however, they can be extremely effective. If you see that you are receiving some bad reviews under your Google, my business profile it doesn’t yet mean that you are under attack.
Therefore, if you strongly believe that there is no reason for them, if they reviews are without any comments or if they are present on other websites linking to you, you can suspect that you are under attack. This can really influence your positioning for few reasons. First of all, Google will see that your backlinks are creating negative image of your company and Google don’t want to show such website to the viewers. Secondly it may reduce your traffic. This is enough to destroy your SEO efforts for a while.
Luckily, we can protect ourselves from these attacks. The best, most efficient way is to create our brand image in advance. If our target audience will be aware of our values, quality of service and brand in general, the reviews won’t affect their behavior, as the know better themselves. When we identify fake or paid reviews we can also reach straight to Google, fill in the form and get them removed.
ULTIMATE TIP TO PROTECT YOUR WEBSITE
It takes some time to destroy website positioning. Not too long but enough for you to spot it and prevent further damage. In order to prevent negative SEO techniques from affecting your website you need to be alert and monitor your website on a daily basis. Luckily you already have big advantage over others. You have read this article and you are aware of these threats, unlike most business owners.
If you combine that with some simple cybersecurity measures, you will encourage most hackers to go and look for an easier target. Share this article to spread awareness of this issue!
