What Is Negative SEO?
When most of the websites use Black Hat SEO to get penalized by Google this act is called Negative SEO. It also reduces the effectiveness of SEO properties of the website by disabling them. It is pretty difficult to deal with these Negative SEO techniques because some of those techniques are out of your control you can’t handle them, like pointing bad links to your site. Other than this, it is also very difficult to detect it. Negative SEO is not like hacking that takes down your website, It doesn’t affect on the look of the website, it only effects for once on your website and your website takes a dip in search ranking and incoming traffic.
Types of Negative SEO Attack
There are two types of Negative SEO attacks which are on-page and off-page SEO attack.
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Negative OFF-Page SEO
In Negative off-page SEO, the attacker will attack your website without changing it internally. Mostly it revolves around using Black Hat or negative SEO link building practices and points them to the target website. Links farms are a series of web pages. It is created to link the other page of the website. Inbound links are very helpful to improve the ranking of your website but if you are getting a lot of links from the same website to increase the number of links artificially then you will get penalized by Google. In a Negative SEO attack, the attacker creates some link farms to target the website and it is hard to even for Google to tell about the person who is responsible for the links but it can lead to a Google penalty on the target site when detected. Copyright complaints are pretty much complex but usually, you can claim someone who copies your posts on his website. But sometimes when you try to copy someone’s post and get a copyright complaint this can be awful for you because after the complaint your page automatically removes for up to 10 days. As you can see clearly that there are many different and difficult ways for negative SEO techniques that can be used to your website but it doesn’t matter how smart they might be, you should never ever think to do any of these by yourself. It can’t be effective forever because it works in the short-term.
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Negative ON-Page SEO
This is totally different from the Negative off-page SEO attack. It generally focuses on the hacking of the website. It hacks your website and makes changes in it. It is not much difficult for the hacker to hack your website. After messing with your setup he could easily disrupt the coding of your website, he can also send viruses and do whatever he wants to do on your website. The real threats are the ones that are hard to see and you can’t do anything when your website gets hacked. The hacker can negative alternating your SEO properties. There are many basic SEO techniques which are intended to be ‘set and forget’ and that’s what can leave you vulnerable to on-page negative SEO strategies. Other than this, The hacker can easily modify the robot.txt to tell Google to ignore important pages or even the whole website. Robot.txt is the most important file which tells the crawlers how to interact with your website.
How to Protect Your Website against Negative SEO
If you really want to protect your website from Negative SEO then read it carefully. The first step to protect your website from the Negative SEO is to detect the signs of attack such as lost of traffic without any reason. It is not much difficult to monitor your traffic if you are checking it regularly on Google Analytics. If your website does not receive any kind of penalty then you can also set up Google Webmaster Tools Email Alert which allows Google to notify you through email. If you have not done anything wrong or illegal on your site then it means that your website is under attack and you need to protect it as soon as possible. The faster you take an action, the lesser your damage will be. It is better to check your website and protect it from the attackers than making yourself worried. So now you know about Negative SEO, just relax and check it and if there is any problem in your site solve it by using the best techniques you know.
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Other rendition to defend your website against Negative SEO attack includes
Be aware of content scrapping – This is one of current trend where good contents are often scrapped and posted elsewhere thus reducing the validation of the original work. Webmaster assistance can help you remove those contents. To find such plagiarized contents, you can easily use Copyscape.
Keep tab on backlinks that are more malicious than good – Backlinks are good to increase the visibility of a website but there are more troublesome backlinks than good ones now. Ensure to remove those backlinks to avoid Negative SEO.
Set up barricades against malwares hackers – Unethical hacking and malware installation is a trend that has victimized numerous website giants in the last few years. Setting up a stronger website security can help you prevent this dangerous event from occurring.
Have a good and organic social media presence – Netizens are bound to be there everywhere. To prevent negative backlash and netizen comments and keep a constant presence amidst the viewers, a social media presence always helps a great deal.
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Keep content plagiarism free at all time – Plagiarism detoriates quality and traffic at a very dangerous speed and can cause your ranking to fall off the grid. Use Copyscape to keep the content Plagiarism free at all time.
Track your website speed at regular interval – Keep a track of server loading time. HubSpot’s Website Grader, GTMetrix, Google’s Page Speed Insights are three great additions to choose from for your regular website speed tracking.