Negative SEO is a scheme that has the potential to harm your website’s Google ranking. Spammy links, rehashed material, and odd anchor text is all the signs that your site has been affected. While stopping an attack is challenging, particularly on larger websites, remaining safe is not impossible.
This guide will help you know the ins and outs of negative SEO is and how to address any issues that can come up. Read on if you are serious about growing and securing your online business.
How Does Negative SEO Affect a Website?
Negative SEO is a type of attack on a site meant to bring the site down or reduce the site’s traffic. It is called Negative SEO because some of the tactics used to attack the site involve submitting spammy links to make a site look bad. The areas that are used to link are often spammy themselves.
Usually, these tactics are only effective for a short period, so any damage is usually temporary. The idea is to use these tactics to temporarily harm a site rather than create a long-term negative result.
How to Identify a Negative SEO Attack
A few signs can signal that your website has been affected by negative SEO tactics. Here are a few:
- A large number of spammy or low-quality links redirecting to your website.
- On-page spam-like scraped content, invisible text, and keyword stuffing.
- An unusual amount of spammy content or links leading to your website.
Make sure to examine the links and what they are pointing to on your website or other websites. If you notice a large number of low-quality links, then you may be a victim of negative SEO.
Thankfully, Google has a handy report that tells you how many spammy links are pointing to your website. It is an excellent rule to review this report regularly to ensure that your site is not being affected by negative SEO.
Who Is Performing Negative SEO?
Typically, negative SEO attacks are made by your competitors. They want to catch up with or, in some cases, overtake you in the SERPs for similar search terms you both use.
However, it’s not unheard of for website owners to perform negative SEO attacks on their websites to save hosting costs.
How to Prevent and Fix Negative SEO Attacks
As always, the best defence is a good offence. Google has introduced a variety of preventative measures to stop negative SEO tactics. These include link disavowals, which allow you to tell Google which links you do not want to be counted.
Other methods include submitting a rel=”no-follow” tag to your problematic links and tracking any pages that you believe may be involved in negative SEO. However, these methods are only effective if they are done promptly.
If you do not catch the attacks early enough, you may want to look into how you can remove the links and make amends with Google’s platform.
Negative SEO is an actual attack that can seriously harm a website’s Google ranking. In some cases, it’s intentional.
The best way to defend against negative SEO attacks is to examine your site’s most valuable links regularly. Google’s Disavow Tool can also help by providing you with a list of the domain names that you should not be working with.
If your site has already been affected by negative SEO tactics, it’s essential to take action. Remove the links, disavow them, and work on repairing your site’s Google rankings.
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