Negative SEO is a practice employed by unscrupulous website owners by making use of unapproved methods to drag their competitor’s rankings down in search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. There can be only two reasons behind using this negative SEO services. First is to completely relegate the website of the competitor and second is to bury the unhealthy rumors about them and their company.
Generally it refers to the tactic when one website buys links and points them at a competitor’s website to torpedo their search engine rankings. Some of the other ways include hacking a website to cause malicious damage on a website or do review bombing pointing to manifold 5-star reviews at a business, making it to appear like the website paid for them or by simply reporting another website’s “black hat” tactics to Google. Therefore, as an owner of the website, you need to be argus-eyed and watch out for new ways to overcome this negative SEO services. The most popular techniques to overcome Negative SEO are:
Paid Linking:
Your competitors may make use of paid links to point thousands of unnatural links back to your website in an effort to lower your site’s rankings. So you need to work with Google, modify your site within their guidelines and ask for a reconsideration request containing details on those links where you have no control.
Ripping Content Before It Gets Indexed:
When you submit a new post to your website, it doesn’t get indexed immediately. Your competitors can make use of this opportunity to loot your content to make it look like the original site is actually duplicating it. You can avert this by maintaining an updated sitemap and systematically re-submit it when your new content is published. Additionally you can perform a Google search by using a sentence from your web page within quotes to check whether your content is duplicated by other websites or not.
Fake Review Attacks:
Your rivals can write fake reviews about your company and can easily add to the business listing. They will even create a false image as if you have created them. In order to avoid this, you need to carefully monitor the reviews and make Google aware of such reviews by using the “Report a problem” link at the bottom of your business listing.
Page Speed:
As more and more crawlers crawl on your site consistently, there are chances for your website to experience slow loading times. You can prevent the entry of bitchy crawlers from crawling on your site by knowing the IP addresses of Google and Bing using IP detection and ensure that you are not blocking Google, Bing and other reliable crawlers from navigating your site.
DMCA Copyright Infringement Removal Requests:
Usually rivals keep track of the most valuable backlinks that your website is receiving and intentionally send an email to the website owner stating that the web page containing a link to your website is considered as a DMCA copyright infringement and should be removed at once. You can make sure that it doesn’t happen by simply thanking the sites through an email and this is far enough to help those links remain forever. Moreover keep an eye on new referral traffic in analytics, which can aid you in identifying new links worth thanking.
Now that you have got an idea about things to look for while monitoring your website and the techniques to overcome negative SEO. Constant monitoring and proper precautions are vital for any website to land on higher SERP ranking.