What is Negative SEO & How To Identify it

by SEO Shop Digital Marketing Company- SEO Shop

The search engine giant Google keep releasing its algorithm updates in order to make sure that most of the organizations are using the latest technologies and moving ahead. And, if we talk about the Google updates for SEO, “Penguin” has made lots of changes in the SEO practices. Since its introduction, hysterics over the Negative Search Engine Optimization has exploded. The negative SEO can harm your website in multiple ways. However, recognizing it on time can prevent you facing those issues. To recognize if you’ve been hit by it, you may also hire digital marketing services providers. Apart from that, we’ve also mentioned some ways that can help you identify the negative search engine optimization and overcome it. But, before that, we would like you to know what does it mean. Let’s get started.

What Does Negative SEO Mean?

Negative SEO can refer anything malicious someone has done to harm your website’s ranking on the search engine. However, according to the context of the Penguin update, the negative search engine optimization means one thing. And, that is - somebody has made efforts to make your link profile look bad. Usually, it means that they have tried hitting you with a huge number of bad quality content or with a ton of black-hat links across multiple domains.

Also, analyze if you’ve had a security breach. For example, identify, if is it a DDoS taking your website down or a SQL-injection attack, modifying content or adding outbound links. If yes then, you need to take it seriously and find ways to handle it quickly. For doing so, you may also get connected with digital or email marketing companies in gurgaon that will not only help you overcome these issues but also, will provide you best solutions to help you regain your online brand reputation.

Apart from that, you need to be aware of the cause of the issue. If you will keep spending your money into fighting a perceived threat that’s not the reason for your problem, you will end up loosing your SEO efforts and watching your website getting penalized.

What Are The Signs You’ve Been Hit By Negative SEO?

As it is mentioned above that if you will find the wrong cause of your problem, you will waste a lot or your time and energy and also, could set your SEO efforts months. Whenever someone of attacking your website/link profile (even it if your competitor) and, if that attack is effective, you will see a sudden spike in low-quality links (unexplained) from a variety of root domains. An aggressive attempt at negative SEO is the work of few weeks. Whenever you find such links, you might have a problem. To identify the different views of your link profile, you may use multiple tools, few of them are mentioned below.

Google Webmaster Tools
Open Site Explorer
Majestic SEO
Bing Webmaster Tools

So, even if you see the spike in the malicious links, their impact can be often temporary. Many times, people look for the methods that get quickly discounted. The problem often goes away if the links go away. Though, it’s not much of the comfort for the short-term but, it’s easy to be so aggressive that Google spots the attack and devalues the malicious links. But, there is one thing you need to keep in mind. Acquiring the accurate balance isn’t an easy task, you may have to make many attempts to make it work.

What Can You Do To Prevent It?

If you have identified that you’re hit by the negative SEO, it’s obvious that you will look out for the ways to get the solution for that. But, what if are able to prevent it. And, in order to prevent it, do good SEO. Apart from that, your best defense would be having a clean and authoritative link profile. If you are having a website, which is powered by strong and generally high-quality links, it becomes harder to harm your site with a short-term attack. However, if your website contains 80% of the junk links, your competitor will be able to push you over the edge easily.

Conclusion:

The Negative SEO is real and it can harm you badly. So, in order to make your website secure, start with what you can control and focus on building a better mousetrap. You would just be required to play well at your end. And, this will become your best protection from the attacks your competitors can throw at you. Hopefully, the given information will be helpful to you. For getting more relevant updates, stay tuned with us.