What Is Negative
SEO?
Negative SEO is the act
of using black-hat SEO tactics to sabotage websites and sink their
search rankings. If you’re new to SEO, then you might also be new to
the term “black hat SEO.” This term encompasses aggressive tactics
meant to game Google and other search engines.
Unfortunately, it’s
startlingly easy to make other sites look guilty of black hat SEO — and
put them squarely in Google’s crosshairs.
Types of
Negative SEO Attacks
Negative SEO could
involve a single tactic used to tank your rankings, or your competitor
may use a combination of tactics. Here are the most common types of
negative SEO attacks:
Hacking a website
– This is self-explanatory! Hacks are most often the job of, well,
hackers who want to hijack an established website for spammy purposes,
but it’s also possible that a competitor could have paid a third party
to hack your site as a negative SEO tactic.
Building spammy links
back to a site – Comment spam, forum spam, and
other spammy tactics are often carried out by bots, which makes them
cheap and hard-to-trace—and that means it’s an attack that’s perfect
for negative SEO.
Stealing a website’s
content and creating a duplicate of the site –
Just like being hacked, if this happens to you, the most likely
explanation is that someone is trying to make a quick buck through some
kind of spammy scheme, but it’s also possible that it could be part of
a negative SEO campaign against your business.
Creating fake reviews
of a business – As reviews become more important to local businesses,
this is a tactic that’s increasing in popularity. Your competitors (or
someone they pay) may fill Yelp, Google, and other review sites with
fake reviews of your company.
Removing your site’s
best backlinks – You’ve worked hard to build
backlinks for your website, but a competitor can easily undo this work
by contacting website owners posing as you and requesting that your
links be removed or changed.
How Real is the
Danger?
Make no mistake —
negative SEO can destroy weeks, months and years of hard-earned search
rankings. It’s a legitimate danger that must be taken seriously.
Although black hat SEO tactics are increasingly more difficult to
execute these days — and even though these tactics are widely shunned
throughout the professional world of SEO — there will always be digital
marketers who’ll resort to these methods.
That said, the chances
of suffering a negative SEO attack are small.
If your website is
experiencing performance anomalies, there’s probably another
explanation. Still, you should always take preventative measures to
protect yourself from negative SEO, and you should always take
seriously the signs of an ongoing attack. Below, we review some
important safeguards that can arm your website against negative SEO.
How Can You
Protect Your Website from Negative SEO?
1. Use Google Analytics
to Watch for Traffic Spikes
Spikes in website
traffic might be caused by an online sale, a catchy social media
campaign or a number of other welcome things. But a large, unexpected
surge of visitors is a classic warning sign of negative SEO — and
traffic spikes might be the most easily noticeable red flags.
One negative SEO tactic
is to spam blogs, forums and comment sections with low-quality links to
a targeted website. The results can be damaging because Google will
crawl these links and potentially penalize the targeted site for its
sudden spammy link profile.
Here’s the good news:
Google Analytics makes it easy to track visitors. Don’t just look at
your overall daily visits; pay attention to how much traffic you get
from referrals, SEO, paid advertising, email, and all the other
channels you’re using. Look for changes that can’t be explained by your
ongoing marketing.
If you do notice
unusual traffic, then run a Referrals report and see exactly where your
visitors are coming from to determine if you’re a victim of comment
spam.
2. Also Look for
Traffic Slumps
If you notice a sudden
drop in traffic rather than a surge in traffic, then you need to dig
into Google Analytics to find the cause.
First, check your SEO
traffic trends. Go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels and
then click on Organic Search in the table. Change the date range to
show the previous 6-12 months to get a birds eye view of your SEO
traffic trends. Again, if you see a sudden drop, then you have a
problem.
Next, check your
rankings using a tool like RankRanger. Various factors cause traffic
and rankings to fluctuate, but a sizable fall in the search rankings
should be cause for concern. Follow the steps below to keep digging in
and determine the root cause.
3. Routinely Search for
Duplicate Content
Quality content is a
hallmark of good SEO.
Websites that have
unique, relevant and substantial content tend to rank better than sites
that don’t. On the flipside, Google frowns upon websites with thin or
duplicate content.
That’s why another
negative SEO tactic is to “scrape” content from websites and copy it
onto scores of junk domains. This can be especially damaging with newer
content. If Google indexes the content on junk domains before indexing
the originating website, then the originating website loses the SEO
value.
This one is easy to
detect. Use a tool like Copyscape to make sure your content only exists
on your website. If you find your content on someone else’s site, email
the site’s webmaster and request that it be immediately removed. You
can also fill out Google’s Copyright Removal form and effectively lay
claim to your content property.
4. Audit Your Site
Links
Regularly reviewing
your link profile can also stop negative SEO in its tracks. It’s normal
for a link profile to grow over time as people learn about your
business. However, link profiles normally grow at a somewhat steady
pace. For there to be a sudden jump in your backlink volume is cause
for alarm.
You can audit your
backlinks using tools like Ahrefs and Moz’s Link Explorer. If you find
a lot of spammy backlinks, then use Google’s disavow service to purge
those links from your link profile.
5. Watch Your Online
Reviews
Few things drive away
customers like a flurry of bad online reviews. And with reviews and
ratings often getting above-the-fold real estate on Google, they’ve
also become a target of negative SEO tactics.
Was your business
bombarded with a string of terrible reviews on Yelp, Google or some
other profile or directory site? If so, you might be the target of a
competing business (or an extremely disgruntled customer). Google and
other review sites let you flag reviews that you think are fraudulent.
Don’t hesitate to use this feature if you’ve been targeted by fake
reviews.
6. Don’t Ignore Site Performance
Is your website running
slower than usual? Is it frequently crashing or getting stuck? And does
your website seem to lag no matter where you are or how you’re viewing
it?
If this is the case —
and if your website’s performance is really, really bad — then that
could be the result of an attack on your website’s server. Hackers
sometimes launch forceful crawling and DDoS attacks to effectively
render websites unusable, resulting in high bounce rates and frustrated
customers.
Tech-savvy marketers can
sometimes address website performance issues, but your best bet is to
contact your webmaster or hosting provider. Your host provider can
likely offer a fix without any additional work on your part.
The Bottom Line
SEO is a tireless
industry, and sometimes the competition gets a little too heated. For
that reason, you must always be vigilant against negative SEO.
Black hat tactics
aren’t as effective nowadays at lifting websites in the rankings, but
they’re more efficient than ever when sabotage is the goal. The damage
from negative SEO can be greatly mitigated by detecting attacks early
and taking corrective actions.
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