Key Steps To Prevent Negative SEO

The medical industry has become highly competitive with various advancements in technology. Also, healthcare SEO has become a crucial element so as to build a recognizable brand. It is vital to sustain the growth of your medical practice or business. However, it is important to stay away from negative SEO. Negative SEO refers to the use of black hat and unethical techniques to destroy a competitors' ranking in search engines. So here are 6 off-page and on-page negative SEO tactics to look out for.

Negative Off-page SEO

Spammy links: Spammy links are links that do not come naturally, and which come from link farms. Most of these links use the same anchor text which may be completely unrelated to the site under attack or may even include niche keywords to make the site's link profile look like the owner is manipulating.

How to prevent it: It is difficult to prevent negative SEO attack, but stay alert and identify any attempt at an early stage. SEO SpyGLass is a tool that gives progress graphs for the number of links in your profile and number of referring domains. Once you have identified spammy links, create a disavow file right in SEO SpyGlass.

Content scraping: Scraping the content and copying it across various sites is another negative SEO strategy that can damage your ranking. When Google finds that the content is duplicated then it will pick only one version to rank. Google can usually find the original version unless they find the stolen one first.

How to prevent it: Copyscape is a tool that helps you to find out content duplication. If you find scraped copies of your content, contact the webmaster and ask them to remove it from their page or you can also report the scraper using Google's copyright infringement report.

Forceful crawling: Desperate site owners try to crash competitors' sites by forcefully crawling it and thus causing heavy server load. This can lead to de-ranking of your site. It happens when Googlebot is unable to access your site for a few times consecutively.

How to prevent it: If you find that your site has become slower or unavailable, then contact your hosting company or webmaster who can identify the reason.

Negative On-page SEO

Modified content: If you find that your content is modified to redirect it to other sites, then is a threat for your business. Modified content is difficult to find out because attackers hide spammy content. This is more of a threat if your site enjoys high authority and link popularity, and could represent an attacker' sunderhand way to improve their page rank by redirecting your users to theirs. Moreover, if Google spots these redirects, your site could be penalized for redirecting to a malicious website.

How to prevent it: Regular audits with tools like Website Auditor are the ideal means to spot such negative SEO tactics. Install Website Auditor and run and re-run the audit, which helps you to spot changes which otherwise would go unnoticed.

Website de-indexed: A small alteration in robots.txt can damage your entire SEO strategy. A disallow rule is all it takes to tell Google to completely ignore your website.

How to prevent it: The best way to avoid this is a regular ranking check that will let you know when your site is de- indexed. With a tool named Rank Tracker you can schedule automatic checks daily or weekly.

Website hacked: Sometimes a hacker may not have negative SEO in mind but the very attack can create issues. Once a website is hacked it may be de- ranked by Google. Or, they may add a line "This site may be hacked" when your website is listed in the search results page.

How to prevent it: The best to prevent hacking is to ensure that your website security is excellent and always keep yourself updated about new anti- hacking protection.

As part of healthcare digital marketing, it is important for all medical businesses to have their own websites that are search engine optimized. However, it is very important to stay cautious about negative SEO that can harm your ranking on Google.