How Negative SEO Can Hurt Your Website
09 Aug 2019

“If you have sufficient PageRank and you regularly publish new content – yes, Googlebot will return frequently to your site to crawl your articles, which will then be indexed. But if you just have plenty of content – even if you publish 5 new unique, original articles a day – Google doesn’t care. No one hears your tree falling…” (Gab Goldenberg)

Negative SEO is definitely real though the chances of being a victim of negative SEO are pretty rare but if affected can be really daunting. There are measures that can inhibit your website from being a victim of such SEO. These measures need to be understood but first let us discuss what negative SEO is.

Negative SEO

Negative SEO is a series of steps taken in the digital industry to somehow defame your competitors’ brand. These series of steps are usually off page in nature i.e. reposting the websites’ content and assimilating some scrappy unnatural links to the website.

Sometimes the website is also aimed to hack thereby modifying the content of the website in a much notorious manner.

Off page negative SEO

Below is a list of off page negative SEO conducts that can be really offensive for your website;

1. Unnatural and spammy links

Usually the competitor associates the targeted websites to a pool of unnatural and spammy links which are using the same anchor text. The targeted website’s niche keyword is also taken in consideration to depict that the website under attack is the doer of all these manipulated activities.

Counterattack

To counterattack the association of spammy links, you need to be vigilant enough and monitor the status of your rankings within the search results. With the help of softwares, you can investigate what amendment has been made in the search rankings; this is the right time to spot on any of the negative SEO.

2. Scrapped content

One of the measures to dishonor the ranking of your competitor is via copying its content. Copied content is generally not rate within the search engines and if however it’s rated the rating is done only once. Usually, Google is smart enough to recognize the original piece of content.

Counterattack

Staying safe from the scrapped content is really necessary for the protection of your higher ranks. This can be done via some of the copied content identification tools available on the internet which allows you to identify the copied and duplicate content. Once identified, you can then contact the webmaster for its reporting or blocking.

“The success of a page should be measured by one criteria: Does the visitor do what you want them to do?” (Aaron Wall)

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