Detecting and Deflecting Negative SEO Attacks
SEO is one of the most vital digital marketing tactics that can open gates for a large volume of traffic on your website thereby increasing the revenue multifold. Since everyone out there wishes to target the customers with their custom gimmicks and approaches, sometimes the competition is expected to get dirty. In this blog post, we will share a few tips on detecting and deflecting negative SEO attacks.
What is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO can be defined as a set of steps effectively taken to bring down a competitor’s rankings by negatively affecting their optimization tactics. One can easily understand it as the opposite of positive SEO which aims at demoting the competitor’s website rather than promoting it for the better.
The first step to detecting and deflecting negative SEO attacks is to accept the fact that it has already happened with your website/product and it is not the end of the world, to be concise.
Identifying a Negative SEO Attack
1. The sudden decrease in traffic
If your website has witnessed a sudden decrease in the normal traffic per day, and you have not opted for any unique technique or even tweaked anything on the website, it can be a side effect of a negative SEO attack, specially customized for your website.
2. Receiving an alert from Google about unnatural links on your website
If your Google Search Console features a message from Google, talking about the penalty and how you have unnatural links or spammy content in your website, it is rather simpler to understand that someone is trying to negatively impact your SEO. Google makes sure to send an alert.
3. Drop in the particular keyword rankings
One can easily identify a negative SEO attack if they are witnessing a sudden drop in the rankings for a few keywords they rank for, while others are relatively doing fine. A good SEO and keywords tracking and maintenance tool can help you figure out the negative SEO attacks in just a gist.
4. Scraped content
One can easily understand that their website or content has been attacked with negative SEO with the entire website content showcasing over multiple other sites on the web. The attacker can easily scrape the content of your website and publish it onto other websites thereby making you look less unique.
Preventing Negative SEO Attacks
1. Set Email Alerts from Google Webmaster Tool
Google is responsible for emailing you alerts whenever your website has been penalized if there was an attempt to hack your website if there are several pages not indexed, and more.
2. Protecting the Backlinks
One of the worst things a high-ranking website can endure is losing the best backlinks they have. This can happen with the negative SEO attacks that one can carry out for affecting your rankings.
3. Protect the Website from Malware
To prevent your websites from being attacked maliciously, you must keep in mind to implement major safety measures. The website must be password protected with a two-step verification process that cannot be hacked by anyone.
4. Check for Copy Scraping
You can use multiple tools on the web to determine if someone is using the same content as your website. If multiple websites are using the same word-to-word content that your website has, you have been probably attacked with a negative SEO technique.
Conclusion
Stay up to date with everything that happens and check your website regularly and keep your website and your brand safe from the outside influence. vidya corporation helps you to avoid such attacks or at least what to do afterward. Awareness is the key and knowledge gives you power.