What is Negative SEO?

There is a famous saying that “If you are positive, you’ll see opportunities instead of obstacles.”Today, in this competitive world, SEO is a very hot topic in the industry. Basically, Negative SEO performs activities intended for the purpose of damaging competitive ranking. There are many ways in which negative SEO is performed. The procedure involves hacking or injecting malware into competitors website. Even, if the user makes duplicate copies of website or steal the content then it would eventually result in lower ranking for that website.

Does Negative SEO really works?

If a site is engaged in creating manipulative links then it can be penalized or can be suppressed using Google Algorithms. So, if the links can hurt the website then there is a strong fear that my competitors or some one else can also make the negative effect on website.

How to discover Negative SEO?

The step to discover if a particular website is target can be checked using back link profile. If you can review the back link once or twice in a month then you can survive in the cutthroat competition.              

You need to consider various factors for back links such as:

• Links having exact anchor text
• Links from low quality domains
• Any irrelevant text

Apart from this, if you view any lowering in ranking standard but there is no manual recovery or any action taken then it might be due to updation in Google Algorithm. MOZ has a vast history to check the updates in your ranking in order to have better view.

Apart from this, the Barracuda Digital’s Panguin Tool pulls the data through Google Analytics and to find out when updation in Google algorithm has occurred. This would further help to know if someone has tried to damage the site.

How to get protected?

Today, in competitive world, there is history of being penalized so it is necessary to perform link cleanup. Hence, it is really necessary to regularly monitor back links. There is a strong need to find and clean unnatural links. This activity is performed on daily or twice in every week. If you are having strong notion that there are unnatural links which are popping then it is very necessary to perform cleanup.

But, Google also performs audit for these links regularly and have fair idea to catch negative SEO. But, if someone totally relies on these algorithm then also there is no surety that algorithm is not going to be 100% accurate. It is really tricky situation where there is no absolute surety that everything is 100% correct. However, one can only say that it has done good job.

The main defense for a website having SEO focused foundation and important ranking metrics is regarding foul play. Additionally, it will be hard to find whether negative SEO has happened due to competitor or the site owner has made mistake for breaking rules but pretending to be innocent.

What to do if Negative SEO attacks?

This is really a million-dollar question to what to do next if your website is target.

Reach Website & Make Links Down

The best way is to reach each of these sites and ask them to remove the links. Ensure that you have a record of your attempts to contact the owners. This process is very time-consuming and hence Google checks that you are putting effort to keep the back link clean.

If any manual action has been taken then one needs to submit the reconsideration request. If the issue is really serious and bad links keep popping up it is a bad idea to ask the website that how these links were created.

Disavow The Links

If you cannot remove any links then you can disavow the links using Google Disavow Tool and the Bing Disavow Tool.

Tell the Search Engines About It

Google has a form which allows to report regarding paid links. You can use technical knowledge to report low quality website which buys links and performs negative SEO.

List of Tools used:

You can view the links in your website through Google Web master Tool to get correct information. There are excellent tools such as Majestic SEO, Opensite Explorer and Ahrefs which serves the purpose to perform negative SEO.

Author Bio:

Simon Hopes is a renowned writer and has several write-ups on the various SEO techniques. He suggests everyone follow the Google updates in order to acquire find and clean unnatural links for your website.