Negative SEO refers to some activities aimed at decreasing a competitor’s site ranking in search engine results. These activities can build spammy, unnatural links, scrape the content, and sometimes hack the sites. Today, in this blog, CloudVandana is giving a few essential tips to protect a website from negative SEO.
Over the last couple of years, the whole SEO industry has experienced a major transformation. Online marketers have taken various SEO strategies to rank a good position on the search engine result page(SERPs. Black hat SEO was one of them. But marketers found the Black Hat SEO strategy very hard and tough to execute. So, a new type of SEO called ‘negative SEO’ took place. If marketers are serious about building a safe website, they should carefully consider all the points.
Negative SEO
Negative SEO uses the black hat and unethical techniques to destroy a competitor’s ranking in search engines like Google. Negative SEO attacks may come in various forms.
- Build Spammy Links to other websites.
- Hack websites.
- Copy the quality content from the website and distribute it all over.
- Negative SEO tries to remove the best backlinks from the website, etc.
Many websites are still not well aware of this threat. But It is easier to prevent the negative SEO than fix the problem. Following tips will help marketers to keep their websites safe from the common dangers of negative SEO.
Ways To Prevent Negative SEO
1. Tracking The Backlink Profile
Tracking the backlink profile will help marketers to prevent hackers or spammers. Spammers generally perform negative SEO by building low-quality backlinks. So it is very much essential to keep track when someone redirects to your webpage through a backlink. Marketers can use a good webmaster tool to check these activities. Webmasters send email alerts when a website gains or loses backlinks. So, marketers do not need to check the backlinks manually every time. Instead, they get all the backlink-related issues in their inbox.
2. Protect From Spammers
Website security is a crucial part of every organization. So marketers should consider taking preventive measures to protect the websites from malware and spammers. For example, WordPress users can install the Google authentication plugin and set up the 2 step verification process. In addition, developers should create backups daily.
3. Protect The Valuable Backlinks
Hackers generally try to remove the quality backlinks to down the ranking of the websites. Sometimes, they even contact the link owner and request the webmaster to remove the backlink. To prevent this, marketers should use the corporate domain name’s email address instead of Gmail or yahoo. The other way is to keep track of the best backlinks. They can sort by page rank. Marketers can use tags to the valuable links to easily detect if any of them gets removed.
4. Check The Plagiarism
Spammers usually copy content and post the content everywhere. As a result, websites get penalized and lose ranking in search engines. There are many tools available on the internet that can show the marketers if the content has been published somewhere else or not.
5. Check The Website Speed
If the website speed suddenly drops off, that is a serious matter to be concerned about. This needs to be checked immediately. Otherwise, spammers may put down the server.
6. Make Your SEO Strategies
Marketers should make a proper SEO strategy maintaining the guidelines provided by Google. However, while making the strategies, marketers should keep a few things in mind.
- Do not buy links for SEO.
- Do not link to penalized websites.
- Do not accept low-quality, enormous guest posts.
- If marketers need to sell anything through links, they should add the link’s rel= “ no-follow” attribute.
Are you looking for a customized CRM solution to enhance your workflow? Please feel free to take a consultation call with the registered Salesforce partner CloudVandana, and focus on your SEO, leaving the other process on automation.
Digital Marketing Manager at Cloudvandana Solutions