Hello readers how are you today, If you have come here then you must have come to know this How to protect website from Negative SEO
Competitors use Negative SEO to reduce the ranking of a website in search engines.
Your competitors can do negative SEO on your website to harm your ranking. Therefore it is very important to prevent negative SEO to maintain ranking in Google SERP.
This article will help you to understand what is negative SEO and how to protect your website from negative SEO.
What is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO is a high risk, low reward activity.
Negative SEO refers to black hat SEO techniques. Your competitors can use this to damage website ranking in search engines.
Nowadays link farms, private blog networks, thousands of bot scraping sites and the links that create them all belong to Negative SEO.
Unfortunately, your competitors or spammers can use these techniques to lower your site’s ranking.
What types of activities come under Negative SEO
Negative SEO activities can be done on the website in many ways. Here’s the most common:
- Creating spammy backlinks on your website.
- Copying and redistributing your content.
- Using link farms (creating thousands of backlinks using the tool) and private blog networks.
- Trying to remove high quality backlinks from your website by spammers.
- Reducing your reputation by creating fake social profiles.
- Pointing your website link with unrelated keywords.
- Hacking your website (adding the wrong Robots.txt file to de-index your site).
How to Protect Your Website Against Negative SEO
1. Set up Google Search Console
How to protect website from Negative SEO:Google always keeps you updated about the website and gives quick information if there is any problem with your website.
Google sends you email alerts if:
- Your pages are not indexed.
- Malware attack is being done on your website.
- You got a manual penalty from Google.
- and many more…
But frst, you need to add your site to Google Search Console. With the Google Search Console tool, you can get valuable insights like Crawl errors, Ranking Keyword, impressions and much more.
- First, you need to create an account. After that, click on ‘Add Property‘.
- Next, enter your domain name and click on the Continue button.
- Now, you have to verify your website that you are the owner of it. It will give you 5 ways to verify ownership. But here I will verify with HTML tag.
- Now if there is any kind of issue in your site, it will alert you.
2. Keep an eye on your Backlinks Profile
How to protect website from Negative SEO: This is the most important process to avoid Negative SEO. Spammers or your competitors can create low-quality links to your website.
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But the question is how to check backlinks.
Well, there are many free and premium tools which allow to check backlink profile.
- Ahrefs – This is a very popular tool that allows you to track your backlinks and keywords.
- SEMrush – Audits your backlink profile. And helps you find the best keywords and monitor your competitors.
- Serpstat – Comes with a powerful tool set: Backlinks Analysis, Rank Tracking, Keyword Research, Competitor Analysis and Site Audit
- Moz’s Link Explorer – Gives a good report of your link profile.
- Openlinkprofiler – Just enter your domain, it will analyze the links.
- LinkResearchTools – This tool identifies toxic links from your backlink profile and allows disavow links and manage your disavow file.
- Monitor Backlinks – Checks the good and bad backlinks of any website.
- Backlink Watch – Analyzes the backlink profile of any website.
- Using Google Search Console Tool – Click on Link >> Top linking sites >> More. Here you will see sites that are linked to your site and giving you backlinks.
3. Protect Your Best Backlinks
There are many website competitors who try to remove the best backlinks from your website.
Usually, they contact the website owner of the link using your name and request to remove your backlink.
To avoid this, you can: When you communicate with webmasters, always use an email address from your domain, rather than using Gmail or Yahoo. Your email should look like this: [email protected]
4. Check Duplicate Content
How to protect website from Negative SEO: It is very easy for anyone to copy the content and it can be published on any other website in few minutes.
There are many spammers who copy the content and distribute it all over the internet.
So, if most of your content gets duplicated, there are chances that your website could be penalized and ranking could be low.
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You can use Copyscape.com to check if your website has duplicate pages on the Internet. Copyscape is a plagiarism checker tool that finds out who has copied your content.
5. Check Your Website Speed
Speed is an important Google Ranking Factor. Faster loading gives better ranking and better user experience to the visitor.
If your website loading speed suddenly slows down, it may happen that someone is sending thousands of requests per second to your server. They do this to bring down your server.
Using GTmetrix and Pingdom tools, you can set alerts for your website loading speed.
6. Secure Your Website
How to protect website from Negative SEO: Google gives more priority to security. There are many spammers who install suspicious code in the site and send your traffic on the website to malicious URLs or steal user data. This has the effect of negative SEO on your website.
In addition, they can hack your website and add the wrong Robots.txt files to de-index your site.
7. Report Fake Accounts Created on Social Media
How to protect website from Negative SEO: If someone creates an account on a social media site using your website name, report it immediately. Because they can damage your brand reputation.
You can use the Mention tool to find out who is using your brand name.
8. Do not become a victim of negative SEO because of your own strategies
How to protect website from Negative SEO:
- Keyword Stuffing – Filling keywords forcibly in the content is called keyword stuffing. This creates a bad experience for the user. In the olden days, this technique was very effective and used to get a high rank in search results. But now, keyword stuffing has a negative impact on your website SEO. Create rich content and use keywords in the right place. Keep keyword density 1.5% – 2% in your content. Also, use the related keyword.
- Paid Links – Do not buy links. The search engine (Google) does not like sites that buy and sell links. It breaks Google’s guidelines.
- Article Spinning – The re-writing of an article is called “Article Spinning”. Negative Effects of Article Spinning: It creates low-quality and sometimes unreadable content. Creates a bad experience on the reader.
- Invisible Text & Link – Invisible texts means writing white text in the content or website. These texts are not visible to the visitor, but search engine crawlers can easily see and index them. It is most commonly used by hackers to hide links.
- Spam Comment – If someone makes spam comments on your site, remove them. If you are a WordPress user then Akismet Anti-Spam is the best plugin that automatically filters spam comments.
- Link Exchange – It only works for a short time! But there are risks too. If you add bad links and unrelated links, then it is a sign of negative SEO.
- Paid Traffic – These traffic increase the bounce rate of your site. People just come and exit your homepage. Higher bounce rate is not good for the website.
What you can do if you notice that someone has started negative SEO activities (low-quality links) against your website:
Create a list of Bad Backlinks using any SEO tool- Like Ahref, SEMrush, Moz etc., then go to the Google Disavow tool page and select your domain from the drop-down, then click on Disavow Links.
How does negative SEO work?
Negative SEO, sometimes referred to as “black hat SEO“, involves the use of malicious tactics on your site to tarnish your reputation with Google and the use of important keywords on a competitor’s site. To steal search engine rankings.
What negatively affects SEO?
Negative SEO is when your competitors try to ruin your ranking by using unethical practices. Your competitor can use black hat SEO techniques to spoil your ranking
Conclusion
It is very important to stop negative SEO for the growth of the website. Here is a summary you can use to prevent negative SEO:
- Set up Google Search Console
- Keep an eye on your Backlinks Profile
- Protect Your Best Backlinks
- Check Duplicate Content
- Check Your Website Speed
- Secure your website
- Report Fake Accounts Created on Social Media
- Do not become a victim of negative SEO because of your own strategies
What other methods are you using to prevent negative SEO against the website? Have you experienced such attacks? Tell your opinion in the comment box!