Bad SEO tactics can cause your site to be penalized by search engines, making it nearly invisible to the potential customers you want to attract. Of course, no one would intentionally set out to get their site penalized, so such tactics are normally thought of as mistakes or holdovers from a previous age when such tricks actually worked.
However, some people are now using negative SEO tactics to intentionally penalize the sites of their competitors. There are even companies that specialize in providing these negative SEO services. They proudly advertise their "unscrupulous" and "unethical" methods--which, strangely enough, are valid selling points when your goal is to harm someone's online reputation.
Since these tactics exclusively utilize off-site SEO, many companies do not even realize that they are under attack until after the damage is done. Therefore, you need to be proactive in preventing it.Below are some relatively simple things you can do to identify negative SEO attacks and keep them from becoming a problem.
- Set up automatic alerts. Have Google Alerts notify you whenever someone mentions your name or web address. You can also set up alerts for whenever your name or address is used in combination with negative adjectives or common spam terms, since those could be used to create bad links or negative reviews in an attempt to get your site penalized. You should also set up your analytics software to alert you of any potential issues.
- Keep track of backlinks. There are multiple programs that can track how many links point back to your site. If you see anything out of the ordinary, such as a sudden increase in the number of links, it could indicate that someone is building spam links to your site.
- Look for suspicious referring domains. Along with the number of backlinks, you should be able to see which domains refer traffic to your pages. Keep an eye out for new domain names that look irrelevant or might provide intentionally low-quality links.
- Watch for irrelevant keywords. If you start getting traffic from search terms that seem to have zero relevance to your site, it may be the result of someone intentionally trying to rank your site for the wrong types of keywords.
- Check for copies of your content. "Scraping," or copying your content and publishing it on other sites, can be used by others to hurt your SEO efforts by dividing search traffic and making it appear that you are the one doing the plagiarizing. Copyscape and similar services can be used to identify scraping.
If any of these steps provide clues that you might be a victim of negative SEO, you will need to research the situation to identify where the spam links, negative reviews and duplicated content are located online. There are then steps you can take to get rid of unfriendly backlinks and get the negative reviews or copied content taken down.
There is one other thing you can do to thwart negative SEO before it even starts: have such a strong positive SEO strategy that negative attacks will not really make a dent. If you consistently do the right thing and completely avoid manipulative SEO tactics yourself, it will be much easier to convince Google and the other search engines that your site should not be penalized.
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