Expert Solutions for Combating Negative SEO Attack

While most businesses today know well that they must keep black hat tactics at an arm’s length, some still remain unaware of how dangerous it can be when black hat SEO is used against them.

Expert Solutions for Combating Negative SEO Attack

This intensely unethical practice called negative SEO can be employed by a competitor, hacker or anyone who has a basic amount of SEO knowledge, and can be used to destroy years of effort you put into organically generate a good ranking and revenue flow for the business.

What Negative SEO Really Is

While a knowledgeable SEO expert can improve the ranking of a person’s page, it is equally likely that an agency with malicious intent could get him to harness his knowledge of ranking factors to get their target’s websites flagged. This is sabotage for the sake of competitiveness and is highly illegal and unethical. It can shut down an entire company’s operation and threaten their cash flow. There isn’t much you can do to prevent it, but there are steps you can take to contain the impact if you are attacked.

Combating Negative SEO

You must identify the damaging backlinks. With some effort and time, someone who is trying to adversely affect your ranking in Google and destroy ruthlessly your website’s authority, without you getting an inkling of it would be linking numerous spammy web pages with your website. If you are in the habit of regularly checking your site’s SERP ranking for specific keywords then you would be noticing the negative impacts of the spammy links, but it is better to use an effective backlink checker tool for identifying them.

Once you have been able to identify the spammy backlinks, it is recommended by SEO experts to take immediate action and request their removal. If you are able to understand who all are responsible, it would be wise to approach them directly and tell them to immediately stop disrupting your website. You could consider coming up with some social media posts where you could identify them and let others know of their malicious intentions.

This direct approach would not be possible in case there are several harmful backlinks. In such a case, you could consider using Google’s disavow process and request Google not to include certain links while indexing and crawling your website. You could consider reporting those spammy backlinks to Google utilizing the Spam Report Form.

Keeping Constant Track of Your Website’s Quality

Keeping constant track of your website’s quality could be helpful in saving you both money and time eventually. Proactive monitoring of the quality of your website could be really effective in identifying negative SEO efforts. You could consider using the backlink checker tools on a regular basis or you could choose a service which would be automatically monitoring your website and thereafter would be sending you a comprehensive report on the new backlinks. This could be really helpful in discovering negative SEO just on time so that it is not able to cause any damage to your website’s SERP ranking on Google.

SEO specialists have come up with another effective suggestion. You could keep on monitoring your website’s speed because small modifications to a page could be affecting its speed. That would, in turn, affect the page’s ranking on Google search. Use one of the numerous tools meant for checking page speed. Finally, you must consider setting up alerts from Google Webmaster Tool. Google would, however, not actually be notifying if someone has actually started using some sort of negative SEO for causing harm to your website. However, the notifications would be helping you to be fully aware of the issues impacting your site.

Ensuring Quality across Your Website

Perhaps the best way to protect your website is uniformity when it comes to quality. You must keep the website aligned with all the quality, design, and technical guidelines laid out by Google, and also churn out valuable, original content regularly. The site must be mobile-friendly as well. There are a lot of videos from Google, as well as, other SEO experts teaching you how you can make improvements to your website and strategy to see results.

Conclusion

It is important that you keep your website valuable, and monitor it regularly. This way, even if you are attacked, you can contain it rapidly and reverse the effects without hurting its rankings too much.