All Your Questions Answered — The Buzz Around Negative SEO!
What Is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO is a technique that your competitors might follow to bring your website’s ranking down. To avoid this you must review your monthly SEO packages and ensure that it includes the best SEO packages. The idea is to use multiple black-hat SEO techniques to bring down your websites, like spammy links, fake reviews, heavy crawling, and more.
A few months after the penguin algorithm in 2012, Google released the disavow tool, which allowed website admins to ask google crawlers not to crawl a few pages. Owing to the hint of negative SEO that surfaced a couple of years before, Google found it imperative to help websites and save them from false penalty.
Since Google’s penalties are taxing enough already, the team decided to take appropriate measures to avoid imposing them on companies that have been a target of Negative SEO.
Through this blog, we’ll find out about the types of Negative SEO and how to prevent your website from Negative SEO without having to pay the penalty.
Types Of Negative SEO
The “Link” Game
This is the most common type of negative SEO and has a lot to do with spammy links. Now, one spammy link doesn’t really lower your site health or rank on the SERPs. But it is the link farms that you have to be careful about. Since we practice inter-linking as a part of our SEO strategy, ensuring that these links are authentic and worth being on our website is very crucial.
The idea is simple; many spammy websites link to each other and increase each other’s popularity. And when you link back to them, Google identifies it as a blacklisted website and naturally lowers your website’s rank.
Keeping an eye on your links via webmaster will allow you to assess the link growth and ensure that your website isn’t involved in any money business.
Duplicating Content
In addition to the false links, duplicating content is a serious issue. People that follow this technique create multiple websites with duplicate content from one single website. When crawlers go through these pages, they find the content plagiarised and might lower your website’s rank along with the others.
More often than not, Google is smart enough to identify the authentic website, but it is possible only when the original website is indexed before the fake one. In a reverse case, you might be looking at a lowered rank right from the beginning. These people are collectively called scrappers and are always on the lookout for freshly published content.
As soon as the content is published, they jump on the website and duplicate it, only hoping that google finds their content first!
Fake Reviews And Testimonials
Each time you wish to consider a company for a service or make a purchase, the first thing you check is the reviews given by others who have previously used the product or service.
Your competitors might spam google with false reviews and testimonials, lower your ratings, and take away your prospective clients. To save your company from this, you must be on the lookout on your google my business listing to ensure that no fake reviews have been lodged.
Hacking And Injecting Malware
The worse of all these is being hacked! The first thing that hackers do after entering the back-end of your website and mess with your robot.txt file. This results in google omitting to crawl and index your page, which may lower your ranking. A regular site check is essential to run timely audits and ensure that nobody hacks into your website or injects nasty Malware.
How To Fight Negative SEO?
Timely Checks Of Backlinks
Every time you run a site audit, you must create a list of all the backlinks you have to remove from your website and keep revisiting it. This allows you a concrete account of spammy links and lets you identify them in the future.
Revamp Your Seo Strategies Periodically
Your SEO strategies must be in sync with the current trends laid down by google or bing. Failing to incorporate them into your strategy can result in a lousy SEO score and lower your website’s rank. The basic guideline is never to publish low-quality content, not selling links with a no-follow link (in fact, not selling backlinks at all would be the first thing to tick off).
Curate A Disavow List
In case you’ve been on the receiving end of Google’s penalty and feel like there is no other resort to cleaning your backlink, then you can curate a disavow list and submit it to Google Webmasters tool to avoid further penalty. This is usually considered as the last resort.
Wrapping Up
With Negative SEO creeping up again, this blog aims to reinstate SEO practices’ rights-and-wrongs and what you must incorporate in your monthly SEO packages. Sometimes, these tactics might be challenging and require you to take assistance from SEO experts; then, you must not shy away. Always reach out to an expert than to do it yourself and do it wrong!
Originally published at https://www.zealousweb.com.
