Protect a Website from Negative SEO Attacks

Running websites can be a draconian task in the current context when unlimited yet impromptu setbacks often push them backward. So, if you own any website that you seek to operate flawlessly, keep doing the extensive groundwork for consistent and coherent maintenance. Under the general perception or strategic plan, your website must function under certain rules and regulations.

Performing SEO strategies to rank keywords in organic searches would be the most notable part of your strategy to keep your website ahead in the race. By having an effective and perfectly tailored SEO strategy in place, the next step would be to focus on improving traffic to your website. It will resultantly convert the traffic into paying customers. This is how you attain success by keeping your website in the leading position.

Until now, we focused on the good side of the story. In the meantime, let’s also remain prepared to encounter negative SEO outcomes as well. What could be the potential modus operandi that might cause such negativities? An unforeseen caveat must be in your strategy list while planning website operation to make it systematic and hassle-free for operation. There is the probability that once your website as the online face of a company starts generating organic leads, a good chunk of unethical or malicious competitors start involved in the wrongdoings with the sole aim to sabotage the quality and rankings of your website. So, their strategy would be to perform negative SEO against your website to bring an embarrassing situation for you.

What is Negative Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Negative SEO can be defined as any possible malicious attempt taken against a certain website to harm rankings and thus affect traffic. Most of the negative SEO steps take place in the general cases of any angry employee or Competitor Companies developing a strong desire to outrank you in the rankings for a specific keyword. They thus plan such strategies in jealousy to let you move downwards through their illegitimate SEO steps intended for your loss.

Through negative SEO, it is possible to damage any website by using malicious backlinks aggressive backlink spamming, etc. You should also keep checking your website at regular intervals to avoid facing such unwelcome scenarios. Also, keep your preventive measures handy to counter any such thing that might damage your website badly. The moment you find anything suspicious is happening with your website, take an appropriate preventive step instantly to avoid ranking and traffic losses or any other possible damages.

Types of Negative SEO

• Getting the site de-indexed
• Altering your contents
• Link farms
• Scrapers
• Fake reviews
• Heavy crawling
• Click frauds
• Modifying the Redirects

How to Protect Your Website from Negative SEO?

Whether you are a victim or even simply think that you might be a possible victim in the future thus you must remain well prepared to protect your website against any potential attack in the future, our webmasters explain preventive measures to keep in consideration. If you incorporate them in your website operations strategy, then you can protect your website against negative SEO to ensure the best safety.

1. Perform Link Audits Regularly

You should keep checking your backlink profile at regular intervals. Monitoring your link profile is a great way to find out any suspicious activity occurring for possible damages. Get that resolved instantly before it goes out of your control. If you suddenly notice a huge spike or drop in ranking even though you haven’t been working on link-building strategies, then it is perhaps the right time for you to take action to find out possible reasons. And, thus you should follow the safeguarding measures to keep your website safe and secure.

2. Check Your Site’s Speed

Site speed is equally an important ranking factor. If your site’s speed is getting slow day by day then it is the time you think seriously with genuine measures. In case you can’t find anything serious while there remains a problem, you might be a victim of forceful crawling activity. The forceful crawling activity would lead to a heavy server load. It means that your website would be bound to slow down. There are also possibilities of it getting crashed. You should thus take the best preventive measures.

3. Check for Duplicate Contents

Duplicate content might also cause you to outrank your website in the rankings for specific keywords. Your competitors can copy and paste your website content at as many places as they can to damage your reputation. This way, there is a big possibility that your website would get penalized so that it starts losing its organic rankings. To check whether your content is copied or not, you can get the help of Copyscape.com to avoid any such problems.

4. Watch Your Social Media Mentions

To harm your online reputation and degrade your ranking, your competitors or any of the jilted employees might create fake social media accounts on your website or company name. They do so with this single aim to damage your reputation. To find out who might be using your brand name or publishing any irrelevant or reputation-damaging post, you can use the popular tools especially mention to find out such issues and get them resolved.

5. Choose the Latest SEO Strategies

You must ensure not to hurt the rankings of your website while using SEO techniques that aren’t acceptable to Google. The latest SEO techniques will improve rankings as well as traffic to your website. SEO activities, which you need to avoid include:

• Avoid getting backlinks from the penalized websites
• Don’t buy or sell the links
• Avoid low-quality guest posts
• Avoid link farming
• Skip keyword cannibalization

6. Upgrade Your Safety

Apart from Negative SEO, you also need to look for unique ways to safeguard your website from cyber-attacks. You should thus migrate to HTTPS instead as it not only offers greater security but also remains a ranking signal. It will have maximum chances for you to improve the overall SEO results.

7. Avoid Black Hat SEO

If you want to protect your website from negative SEO, you must stop black hat SEO strategies, including the cannibalization of keywords, stuffing of keywords, farming of links, etc. among others. In addition, also avoid all unnatural SEO strategies.

Black hat SEO strategies may benefit you instantly, but in the long run, they will get you penalized by Google. Make sure negative SEO is considered an illegal activity.

8. Be Polite with Customers and Competitors

Negative SEO can also be the result of negative relations with your competitors and customers. An outraged client or an irritated competitor with a strong motivation for revenge can start doing negative SEO for your website. If you meet your competitors, try to be polite and behave well.

On the other hand, your customers become an advocate for your brand if you treat them well. Treat your customers professionally and politely; never, ever argue with them even if you are right.

9. Protect Your Best Backlinks

Alike friends, you also create enemies knowingly or unknowingly with time. Spammers and enemies will try to remove your best backlinks. First, they will generate an email from your name in Gmail or Yahoo and contact the website owner to remove the backlinks.

You have two ways to protect your best backlinks:

A. You should always communicate with webmasters using your domain’s email address instead of Gmail or Yahoo.

B. Keep tracking all of your best backlinks regularly.

10. Secure Your Website from Malware and Hackers

Secure Your Website from Malware and Hackers as cyber-attacks are on the rise year after year. Make sure your website is equipped with all-powerful safety guards to protect your users.

Cyber-attacks aren’t technically negative SEO, but Google flags compromised sites. So, your websites should be safe from all Malware and Hackers.

11. Keep Checking Your Website Analytics to Track Any Spike

You’ll see a significant increase in your website traffic multiple times. There are various reasons for a spike in your traffic. It could result from an ongoing sale on your site or a viral social media post. However, if there is a sudden spike in your website traffic, it may pinpoint negative SEO. You must resolve this issue as soon as you see the signs.

When your blog posts, comments, and community or forums are spammed with irrelevant, low-quality links, it means it is a technique of negative SEO. As Google finds spammy links, it will penalize the source site as per the algorithm. So, protection from negative SEO attacks is required.

Related: Ways to Generate Organic Traffic without Google

12. Create a List on the Google Disavow Tool

There are many ways competitor websites include spammy, low-quality links to your website through comments, forum topics, and guest blog posts. A Google algorithm can find the destination of such a link and penalize the source site. With the help of the Google Disavow Tool, you can create a disavow list that you can submit to the Google Webmaster Tool if you get a penalty for spammy links.

There are many backlinks monitoring websites that you can use to create such a list. It is crucial to keep this in mind because as backlinks can improve your ranking as a niche site, they can also cause a penalty for containing poor link building.

13. Sudden Slump in the Traffic

Just like website traffic can suddenly go up for various reasons, it can also take a plunge. There are many reasons why your website traffic sees a sudden drop. It could be broken links, redirection issues, lousy SEO, inconsistency in publishing content, etc.

A website’s traffic graph is sometimes different; there are times when the graph will go downwards. But when the fall is sudden, it might be a warning sign of something unusual. Know your site’s traffic trend by viewing the website’s performance in the last few months. Now, you’ll understand if there is any suspicious issue in the traffic.

14. Check Your Online Reputation

How a website appears online can make or break its online reputation. Your customers review your content and services online, which further works as an instrument to attract more diverse traffic to your site. As a website owner, you know the power of online reviews- both positive and negative. As positive reviews boost your confidence and inspire your intentions, negative reviews can teach you many things.

But when you get negative reviews, there must be something wrong. It could tarnish your reputation by posting fake reviews, which is a crucial part of negative SEO. Keep counterfeit reporting reviews to keep your website safe from negative SEO attacks.

15. Track the CTR of Your Keywords

If you are a website owner and work with analytics and keywords regularly, you know how important it is to balance website traffic and the bounce rate. Many algorithmic bots create fake bounce rates by programming so that the hits bounce off as soon as they visit the homepage. This negative SEO is tough to tackle, but if you keep track of your CTR of the keywords, you can manage to stop it.

Conclusion –  Protect your Website From Negative SEO

Being in the trade as an entrepreneur, you must remain well prepared to deal with all challenges or circumstances—including unpleasant situations. It is a universal fact that with your growth, you also start making enemies on several fronts. Your enemies can be the jilted former employees or competitors and or counterparts that might start negative SEO to damage your reputation. Therefore, you should make it a routine to keep checking your website at regular intervals to also ascertain taking the right decisions at the right time.

Keeping your website safe from all sorts of negative SEO strategies or activities by either any of your competitors or jilted employees might prove difficult for you every time. By involving our webmasters, you rest assured to safeguard your website. It will stay safe from any potential attack and perform well in search engines due to our experts’ protection strategies.

If you want to safeguard your website from negative SEO or different types of writing services, do let us know. We are a team of professionals working round the clock to satisfy each client.