What Is Negative SEO & Why Should You Care?

by SEO Long Island We can perform on any website.

SEO has evolved, and ranking high on Google is today more complicated than it was three years ago. As more businesses go online, Google’s guidelines are changing to deliver a better user experience. Negative SEO is one SEO trend that Google is increasingly targeting to achieve that goal.

In this article, you will learn everything you need to know about negative SEO and how to protect your website from it.

What is negative SEO?

Negative SEO involves hurting your competitors’ rankings on search results with black-hat SEO and other unscrupulous techniques. Among these techniques are:

Website hacking
Pointing spammy links to a competitor’s website
Copying and pasting content from a competitor’s website all over the Internet
Posing as your competitor and requesting that their top backlinks be removed from the linking website
Creating fake social media accounts to review-bomb and tarnish the competitor’s online reputation

It is a real threat.

Negative SEO is a serious threat, particularly to e-commerce businesses. While there are techniques to prevent and even repair the consequences of negative SEO, it is far easier to be aware of the threat and prevent it than it is to fix it. Google has a Disavow Tool to help with this issue, but every New York City SEO expert will recommend that you only use it as a last resort. It takes 2-4 weeks to work, and the damage has probably already been done by that time.

Unfortunately, detecting and proving a negative SEO attack can be tricky — more so if your website is new, has low-quality content, or has previously featured spammy links. Many webmasters believe that they are the targets of a negative SEO attack when, in fact, the drop in their rankings could simply be the consequence of a Google algorithm update. Therefore, before rushing to judgment, make sure:

Your content follows the most recently updated Google guidelines.
Your content has been optimized and is constantly updated.
You have audited your backlines and ensured that there are none that Google may consider spammy.

Preventing negative SEO attacks: what can you do?

Set up email alerts in Google Search Console.
Monitor your existing backlinks with tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush.
Keep malware and hackers out of your website with a good firewall, a strong password, SSL certificate, and regular backups.
Check for duplicate content on your site.
Stay on top of your social media mentions with Google Alerts.
Test your website performance with Google PageSpeed Insights.
Do not use any black-hat SEO techniques yourself.

How do you respond to a negative SEO campaign targeting your website?

Say you just found that someone has launched a negative SEO campaign against your website. What are you going to do now? While it would be easier to engage professional New York City SEO services, here are some steps you can take to mitigate any damage caused by the campaign and prevent any additional damage to your website:

Put together a list of all the suspicious backlinks that must be removed.
Contact the link’s webmaster and request that the link be removed.
If you have been unable to reach the webmasters, create a disavow list in Google Search Console.

Spammers and unscrupulous competitors can easily undermine your website. With the information in this article, you can minimize the impact of a negative SEO campaign and protect the integrity of your brand.