Imagine one day you open the Google Analytics Report and see a big drop in visits. You’re looking for algorithm updates – none of them happened recently, you haven’t made any link changes, and you know your code is perfect. What could be the cause of this? No, you certainly wouldn’t hire Sherlock Holmes, but you should think about what your competition is doing because you are likely to be affected by negative SEO.
Here we are going to explain what it is all about, what types there are, and how to protect your website from its bad effects.
WHAT IS NEGATIVE SEO?
In the online world, negative SEO is what some only whisper about. You know it happens, but you are not sure who is behind it. This is certainly not an open question, such as B. Black Hat Techniques. In fact, some consider it some kind of black hat SEO due to the fact that it has a lot to do with prohibited acts.
In contrast to ‘positive SEO’, negative SEO turned out to be, on the one hand, a tactic to destroy the position of the competition and backlink profile. For example, when you notice a huge jump in visits, the first thing to check is your backlink profile. Pages can have thousands of bad links that Google considers spam and gives them penalty points for their nature.
TYPES OF NEGATIVE SEO
1. SPAM LINKS
Spam links are any links that are deemed not to occur naturally. But in large numbers and often unrelated to the niche of your website. Spam links usually come from link farms, groups of different websites – their sole purpose is to locate thousands and thousands of links. Link farms can also be PBNs (private blog networks), websites that already have some backlinks and authority by the time they don’t become part of a link farm. However, you need to know that not all websites are link farms. For example, websites like the recently passed DMOZ link to all the websites in the world, so with this one you don’t need to worry.
How to fight back:
Even though there isn’t a surefire way of knowing when your competition is going to attack your website until it does, what you can do when it does is notice the attack and act accordingly. For example, if you notice a spike and then a large jump in visits, it may be an indication of an attack. An obvious solution to this would be to disavow spammy links.
2. CONTENT SCRAPING (COPIED CONTENT)
Copied content (s. Scraped content ) is to give a negative SEO technique that is based on a blatant copying part of text from other websites and then insert on your site without regard to origin. Sure you can copy something and give the author or even put a link to the website where it was originally published, but if you want to get a quick increase and position on a website due to other people’s efforts and its content, that will do that way. In some cases, Google can see both pages with the same content and choose yours to penalize them for the duplicate content. You would certainly not like this.
How to defend yourself: Until you pull up a term or phrase from your website and notice it, there is no way to get an alarm or a notification in your inbox if someone tampered with your content. However, you can use online tools like Copyscape and find out who added lines to you from time to time. If you discover such cases of negative SEO, kindly ask the person to remove them or – just notify Google.
3. HACKING YOUR WEBSITE
Hacking your website doesn’t always mean it will be overthrown, it can also mean that your website has been hacked by someone getting through your security lines and modifying content a bit, or worse – adding units of code or spam links, which can negatively affect your website ranking. If Google suspects that a website has been hacked, Google can even add a line in the SERP that says, “This website may have been hacked” to warn visitors so they choose not to click.
How can you defend yourself against hacker attacks?
The best defense against hackers is prevention. Make sure that you keep your website at top security levels and stay up to date with the latest news on anti-hacking protection. The newest thing. That Google will be used to show your visitors that your website is secure is SSL. So you should be concerned about implementing SSL on your website.
And finally, maybe the best advice would be not to make enemies. Your competition doesn’t have to be your enemy. You should build healthy relationships and, first and foremost, prevent these things from happening in the first place.
Of course, this isn’t an extensive list of negative SEO techniques. Other things also occur. If you know anything about it and want to share it with us, don’t be afraid to write. It is the comments below.
Have you noticed a drop in traffic and positioning recently? Perhaps it wouldn’t be absurd for an SEO specialist to review your website. Contact PopArt Studio, an SEO agency that will advise you for free.
