Negative SEO is a branch of black hat SEO. One of the prominent ways of using bad SEO tactics to de-rank competitors. It is successful to a very good extent if practiced correctly. Though it is majorly hated by the SEO industry it won’t change the fact negative SEO exists and spammers are ready to do it at a minimal cost of $5.
There are many ways one can do it for example –
- Link Audit
- Content Scrapping
- Keyword CTR
- Site Speed.
Especially in India, this practice is fairly active. If you are a brand or organisation who is facing such issues you may look for good SEO service providers in India who can help you manage all these and guide you in tackling a negative SEO attack.
If your website goes through a negative SEO attack, You’ll have to suffer a lot. Thus it is better that you must be ready with your counter & protective measures to prevent it.
But the main question is how to protect yourself from these negative SEO attacks? To help you with that here are some of the tricks you may use to help you protect your business from negative SEO
Content Duplication
You took so much time to work on your content and its quality, uniqueness and variety and one day a spammer just copies it and paste it anywhere & everywhere on the internet. That’s it.
Content duplication leads to plagiarism and ultimately affects your website ranking and reputation in the Google results. In this situation, there is a huge possibility that your website will be penalized.
You may use Copyscape to see if your website content is being used somewhere else without your permission.
Keeping Records of Your Backlinks.
Every site reaches a particular reputation by creating a long chain of quality backlinks. This helps them rank better in the search results but what most of the websites do is in the worry of going ahead they start losing track of their past work.
Keeping a check on your past backlinks will help you in multiple ways. It helps as a record of your past work and its always good to keep an eye and always check the authenticity of your past backlinks.
Social Media Monitoring.
This is the easiest way of ruining the reputation of your website and name digitally.
Spammers create a fake profile and start trolling you on your social media posts commenting mean & abusive statements about your services, products, and brand as a whole. In such situations, you must learn how to respond to negative feedback to your content and always be ready with a reply.
In another example – They may create a fake account on your company and brand name and use it to mislead your target audience or trusted customers.
To check on this you may use mention.net. Also reporting spam to these account pages & profiles.
Another way to deal with it is to create an account and use the create alert option and add keywords to it. This option can be used for multiple languages.
Website Speed
Your server can be at risk of a breakdown.
Observe very keenly, is your website has suddenly started taking more time to load? That is because someone is sending you thousands of requests per second and it’s ruining your server speed eventually hampering your website load time.
To handle this, create email alerts so you will know when something like this will happen. The key is to make a prompt decision and see that if your website is being attacked that support from your hosting company as soon as possible.
Work On Security
This seems to be a predetermined action you should take for the security of your website. Security is a term which is extremely critical.
When using WordPress, opt for two-step verification to protect your website credentials and authority.
Always create a backup of your files in a regular interval of time. Always install an antivirus if your website lets users upload files. As it is the most common way of getting your website affected by anonymous file uploads and viruses.
By the end, I may also suggest some simple measures to perform to prevent your website from being a victim of negative SEO like –
Do not link to penalized websites, create a list of backlinks you should remove, use your company name in 60% of the anchor texts, use Google webmaster tools.
By performing all these measures you will see how easy it is to actually prevent your website from Black Hat SEO practices.
