Do you have any idea about Negative SEO? You should have because your competitors always use it to down your rank from the search engine. As a result, your website is losing rank and your competitors are overcoming you! At the same time, you are penalized by Google because of it that you are not aware of. Don’t worry. In this post, we have come with a solution to your problem. Here we are going to discuss 15 Negative SEO Tactics and Their Prevention Process.
What is Negative SEO?
The practice of negative SEO is increasing day by day because of too much competition. Negative SEO is done to down the site of a competitor from the search ranking. Sometimes, it can remove the site from the search. It is opposite to positive SEO.
How to Track Out Negative SEO Services Attack
If you are an expert or examine carefully, you can easily detect a negative SEO services attack. To make things easier, here we are providing you with 3 tips so that you can understand the signs of the attack. Let’s jump:
- Unexpected Go down In Search Traffic: The goal of negative SEO is to demote one’s search traffic. If it happens to you, the problem may be a symptom of negative SEO.
- The Notification of Manual Penalty: As a website owner, you must know about two kinds of Google penalty. One is – manual and the other is – algorithmic. You can commonly identify the penalty known as algorithmic while noticing the traffic goes down. But in case of a manual penalty, you will receive a message from Google notifying that an action has been taken against your website. Moreover, when your SEO becomes whiter, the penalty can be regarded as a negative attack.
- Individual Keyword Ranking Drops: Downing search traffic may lead to down your rankings. A rank tracker can help you observe the essential keywords you have. If your position is static, it is okay! But if you find a sudden drop, it may be a symptom of negative SEO.
Negative SEO Tactics
You can demote your competitor by using some negative SEO tactics or Negative SEO Services. Or someone can do the same with you. Let’s have a look:
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Spammy Link Building
Spammy or low-quality link building is the most genuine and dominant form of negative SEO. They come from a link network, scrapebox comment, or a cheap and common form of Fiverr gigs (Actually They are known as Negative SEO Services). They consequently make an abrupt influx of tricky links point to your site.
You will have two approaches or ways to link spam at the time of negative SEO. They can be used by an immodest SEO. The first one is the volume approach and the second one is the over-optimized anchor text approach.
- In the volume approach, thousands of low-quality links are set to your website.
- And in the over-optimized anchor text approach, thousands of exact match anchor text links are pointed to a ranking page and growing up the ratio of its anchor text.
Though they have differences, their common goal is to penalize your site either algorithmically or manually from the webspam team of Google.
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The Request Of Fake Link Removal
This is a secret type of Negative SEO. In this negative SEO attack, the attacker will send a short message via email telling or requesting your backlink owners to remove their backlinks from your site. They will tell them that their client’s site named “X” has links on your page “Y” and due to some recent modifications in the algorithm in Google, they don’t need these links any more. The attacker will also request to move them from your website.
Most of the time, the requests are fake. If they remove the link, your site will face problems. Remember, this campaign is a destructive form of Negative SEO. It will certainly harm your site. So, you have to be careful about it and request your backlink owners to inform you when they will get this kind of fake link removal request.
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Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS)
The goal of distributed denial of service attacks is to crawl your site frequently so that your customers find it hard to use the site. Even Google finds it hard to crawl and thereby going your site offline because of a heavy load to the server.
Your competitors send a huge load of traffic to your website utilizing automated mayhem and crawlers so that it can crash the site. The visibility of your site will gradually be reduced it Google finds it difficult to reach the site. Again, the traffic of the site will not return because of bad site experience.
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Content or Code Changes
The code or content changes are other types of Negative SEO. Usually, hackers do this. They try to make a back hole of the security of your site and get permission to your content and code to access. They change the visibility of everything to your visitors or customers. They generally change the contents for that the customers see different things to Google. Not only that they include some links of other sites and whenever you click on your intended links, they take you to the links fixed by the hackers. These are the signs of Negative SEO. And to get rid of this, you have to pay a lot of money.
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Removing Site From Google Search
You may have a good relationship with someone or you may have hired someone before. But when the relationship ends, he/she may try to harm your site as he/she is familiar with the privacy factors. Ultimately, you will lose access to Google to your site. Your consultant changes the codes in the robots.txt file to forbid all the bots from crawling your site. Even if you are verified by Google, you cannot protect your site from this kind of Negative SEO.
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Hacking Your Website
Hacking websites is another type of Negative SEO that can bring destruction to your site. Google has to protect the users from destruction and for that, it tries to take less preference of the sites hosting viruses or malware. If Google does not keep it away from the SERPs, it will certainly add a flag named ‘this site may be hacked’ to any consequences of the site. You must not click on the flag rather you need to see the ranking tank of your site. Good security software can help you monitoring for hacks in this regard.
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Distributing and Copying Content
You may not get a penalty for copying and distributing content but your site may face problems with SERPs. Eventually, Google and other web browsers are highly capable of recognizing the primary origin of your duplicate content. This may happen when you utilize the same keywords and links. The original site has higher ranking SERPs if it is from a real website. Therefore, you need to be more conscious of it.
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The Canonical Negative SEO
The Canonical Negative SEO is a new type of Negative SEO. You can simply understand the fact if you think carefully. It happens while scraping off the main sections such as the tags, title, canonical tags, and meta description from any kind of real estate web page. As a website owner, most often you want to copy them to get a higher rank on the SERPs.
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Forceful crawling
You may encounter a formidable competitor. He/she may be desperate to crash your website completely. This kind of Negative SEO trick is taken by crawling your website forcefully and as a result, it will cause a heavy burden to the server. It will be responsible for slowing or even destroying your site completely. If the browser of your system cannot access the URL, you must lose your crawling budget. You must lose your rank if it occurs continuously for several times.
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De-indexing
Your whole SEO technique may be destroyed if the robots.txt of your site is altered. You are familiar with the disallow rule made by Google. In this case, the rule informs Google not to pay any heed to the important pages you have! Sometimes, it may happen even to your whole website.
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Link Farms
A spammy link may not affect the other quality links of your website. For this reason, Negative SEO is connected to link farms. Here linkfarms refer to a group of sites or a circle of interrelated websites. For instance, you can take the example of the WP Bacon. It is a podcast site. It’s about WordPress. The site was infected by thousands of links associated with the anchor text named “porn movie”. The attack also includes a disavow file. The file was also associated with spammy links. This was a severe attack though WP Bacon could recover it later.
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Scraping
You will have a lot of duplicate content on various websites. Interestingly, Google will rank any one of them and avoid the rest. So, if anybody imitates your content, that’s bad for you! You always think that Google will smartly recognize your original one. But unfortunately, sometimes it cannot! What if it does not recognize the original one! For this reason, this is regarded as the ugliest type of Negative SEO.
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Negatively altering your SEO properties
Altering your SEO properties negatively can be harmful to your search ranking. Someone may alternate the alt text on your photos to make them less useful. You may set and forget many fundamental SEO strategies. It can make you the victim of negative on-page SEO.
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Changing the Robots.txt
Robots.txt is another essential files among others, especially when the question of SEO comes. The file lets the crawlers know about the way of interacting with your website. Not only that, it informs Google about the part you generally don’t want them to crawl. It is easy for attackers to get into your site and change the robot.txt file. And thus, inform Google to avoid essential pages or some cases, the entire website.
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Open Redirects
Open redirect is a process by which “SEO Experts” find a panelized website from the different marketplace, for example, expireddomains.net and redirects (“301 redirect/Permanent redirect”.) it to the targeted website.
The Open Redirect Attack is a negative SEO that redirects you to an additional page liberally instead of accessing the original website. This attack is a kind of security fault in a web page or an app that makes it not to pass exactly through authenticating URLs. This is a crash in the procedure that makes the enemies able to push the users to another third-party malicious website.
How to Prevent from Negative SEO Services Attack
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Use Alerts in Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a useful tool that is highly effective for controlling Negative SEO. It provides critical data with reports, looks for the safety of your website, detects sneaky or abuse manual actions, and so on.
Google Search Console alerts will notify you if something unusual happens. To do this, you need to go to the “dashboard of Google Search Console“. Enter into the settings and push on “Search Console Preferences“. Then, enable “email notifications“. Thus, you will get alerts automatically via email if something wrong happens to your sites, such as malware attack, page abolishment from indexation, problems regarding server connection, or penalty.
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Monitor Your Backlink Profile
Manually adding poor-quality links and redirects and pointing them to the sites are the important and popular types of Negative SEO tactics. For this reason, you need to check your backlinks carefully and at the same time, review the link profiles daily. A perfect monitoring tool can handle the situation with ease. However, if you detect any suspicious or unwanted links, you need to check its source first. If it seems good, there is nothing to worry about.
Taking special care of the best links of your site is also very important and at the same time, you should take steps to protect them. Because your competitor tries to remove your important links and will try to befool you by applying various tricks including sending a request to remove your links. In this case, you had better use the professional email you have for business purposes.
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Disavow Tool
If the backlink profile of your site contains spammy links or a lot of poor-quality backlinks, your site will be the victim of rank drop or get a penalty from Google. You need to throw them away if you want to survive with happiness. You should not worry at all because Google has introduced a disavow tool that can abolish the spammy links from your website. By making the documents accurately and meeting their demands, you can easily use the tool.
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Check for Duplicate Content
Your competitors want to make a duplicate copy of your content and spread it. This form is a regular and common type of Negative SEO. If they become successful, your site will face trouble and you can even get a penalty from Google.
A premium plagiarism detection tool can help in this regard. The Copyscape tool can be the best choice for you! You can frequently check your contents to check whether they are still unique or not. It will help you to make sure if someone has posted them again!
But you have to remember that if anyone publishes your content and connects the canonical URL, it will not harm you. He/she is just spreading your content instead of stealing it.
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Improve Your Password Protection
Password is the most important factor regarding protection. You have to be careful about the security of the network you used seriously. Use such kind of passwords that will be impossible to break by hackers and malware. While creating passwords, try to make it longer by adding numbers, small and large letters.
For the WordPress CMS users, Google authenticator plugin provides strong protection for your website. It has come with a two-factor authentication and has made the login procedure more difficult. When you log in to the WordPress Panel in this way, you need to write down the password along with a code sent to your mobile number. Moreover, you can use this Google Authenticator with Amazon, Gmail, Dropbox, etc.
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Mentions Monitoring
Sometimes, some spammers make fake profiles to social media to damage the image of your brand. Apart from that, you sometimes notice the complaints of your unhappy customers. They make unfavorable comments on their profiles. This is another way to destroy your fame negatively.
A social media monitoring tool can help you a lot in this regard. It will monitor all the citations and channels of social media and inform you if something happens by sending notifications. If you find someone trying to harm your site, you should report them immediately.
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Never make enemies
Never make enemies, otherwise, you will be the victim of Negative SEO. If you make a bad relationship with your customers, they will try to take revenge and this can bring unhappiness to your SEO life. You had better make a good relationship with others and to do this, you need to behave politely and professionally while handling the customers. Avoid arguing as much as possible.
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Site speed
Slowing down your website suddenly can be another type of Negative SEO. In this process, the spammers send thousands of requests to your server to slow it down. So, you have to be careful about this and at the same time, you need to monitor your site daily. Use a smart tool that can send you notifications or alerts about the present speed of your website and the status of the server.
The Conclusion
Negative SEO tactics are harmful for your website. They can bring destruction if you don’t control them. Just follow the prevention processes we have stated above and make your website problem-free. Even you can follow and apply the tactics to down your competitors’ rank from the search engine.