If you are struggling a lot to increase your website’s organic traffic, that probably someone is using negatively against your website. And this whole scenario might get your website penalized, which might affect your growth rate.
According to the research, once your website gets penalized, it becomes tough to recover it from scratch. So it’s better to pre-planned the thing and analyzed the few aspects of not getting your website into negative SEO aspects.
Through this post, we will be talking about negative SEO and how you can protect your website from it to grow organically in each aspect.
But the major question that might appear in your mind that ‘What exactly is negative SEO?’.
And it’s generally obvious just because most of the bloggers (including pro bloggers) are also unaware of the negative SEO.
So if you are someone who is looking for the inductor knowledge about negative SEO, then make sure to stay with me till the end as I will be confusing a few of the major norms about it and how you can actually keep your website away from it for a good reason.
Let’s begin with the basics.
What Is Negative SEO?
Probably you might have heard that Black hat SEO is truly ethical SEO techniques used by most of the competitor who is constantly ranking on the top of search results. This is the reference of negative SEO, which might get your website down.
Most of the competitor’s websites used to apply negative SEO/ black hat SEO techniques upon your website to tarnish the website’s reputation.
And this entire scenario happens due to u awareness of the black hat SEO, which needs to be resolved asap.
How Exactly Negative SEO Works?
One of the major reasons behind the president with the negative ratio is to take the competitor’s website down, ranking on the top of search results organically.
Nowadays, most of the websites ranking on the top of results are affected by it. The working of negative SEO is quite complicated. According to our research, we have got to know about a few of the major points about working of negative SEO, so here are they:
- One of the basic workings is to purchase the blackhat links via some freelancing platforms like Fiverr and Upwork and hiring people to comment spam, forum, etc. that significantly takes the highly ranked website down.
- Most of the negative SEO experts used to identify the websites getting into the competition and thanking higher on the search results. They’ll target search websites and take them down internally. It can be done by anyone like your teammates, employee, company, etc., who’s not happy with your success.
- Using the ‘adult anchor text’ is another black hat/ negative SEO process that might get your website down permanently.
Google is considered the most secure platform that identifies the spammy website and gets its website down. Although the fault is not of the website owner, the website ranking will get down due to some unauthorized activities done by competitors.
So it is very essential to identify negative SEO.
But,
How To Identity Negative SEO?
There are so many ways to identify the negative amount which we have compiled some of the basic notations that will surely help you from scratch to know about the negative SEO, so here are they:
- Your website begins to get a lot of traffic from search engines such as Google and Bing. This is mostly abnormal traffic, but you are not doing any special promotion or SEO.
- Your website gets a lot of social mentions and links.
- Your keyword rankings suddenly drop without any apparent reason
- Your website is ranking higher than competitors for the same keywords you used to rank.
Apart from this, there are several different ways to identify the negative. If your website ranking is suddenly going down on the specific keyword, it showcases that it might have been affected by a negative SEO.
You should definitely analyze your website backlinks profile and find out the toxic links to take this consideration.
Due to this negative SEO, your website ranking will get updated, and it impacts badly upon your traffic and the overall rate of the website.
What Are The Different Types Of Negatives SEO?
There might be several different types; we’ve compiled the 5 major negative SEO types that you should definitely know about. So here are they:-
- Scraping content from a website: One of the most common negative SEO types is creating duplicates of your website. This is where the attackers steal your website content and spread it across the internet, including social media and other websites. If you are unsure, scraped content is content taken from your website and used elsewhere.
- Hacking a websiteThis was used in 2016 against our blog, BloggersPassion. Someone hacked into our website and stole links. They then changed the files on our hosting servers to point those links at malicious sites. You must take all precautions to protect your website files against hackers and malware attacks.
- Toxic backlinks: Another common method is to create toxic or suspicious links using spammy anchor text. To remove these links, make sure you keep an eye on the backlink profile.
- Fake reviews posted online: Before buying a product, most people check online reviews. Fake reviews posted by competitors about your brand or website could damage your online reputation.
- How to remove backlinks from a website: Spammers use a common tactic to remove your top backlinks is sending out false removal requests to bloggers.
Once you note these facts, it’s better to know how you can protect your website from negative SEO to avoid demotion in terms of ranking. So let’s get deep into it.
How To Protect Your Website From Negative SEO?
There might be so many different ways that will help you to protect your website from negative SEO, but we have chosen the 4 major ways that are essential for you to know about, which can be practiced anytime. So here are they:-
Make Sure To Defend Against The Fake Backlinks Removal Requests
It is essential to monitor your top backlink sources. You might find your competitors trying to send you fake requests to remove backlinks. Who knows?
Scammers and hackers will send emails to request the removal of your links. If you are not careful, you could become one of their victims. You may also lose all your backlinks.
What can you do for your best backlinks to be protected?
To quickly detect disappearances of valuable links, you can use the Semrush Backlink Audit Tool.
The Backlink Audit tool from Semrush allows you to quickly find all lost and found backlinks.
It is important to keep an eye out for “lost backlinks” so that you can immediately take action if you see anything.
Get Rid Out Of Suspicious Backlinks
Negative search engine optimization can be avoided by paying attention to your website’s backlinks.
Spammers are known for creating spammy links that point to your site, which could lead to your site being penalized in search results.
It is best to remove any suspicious backlinks from your site and disavow them.
What can you do to achieve this?
Tools like SEMrush are renowned tools that make it super feasible for use. SEMRush backlinks audit tool is to get rid of toxic links.
This is how it looks.
As you can see above, the Semrush Backlink audit tool shows you a list of all toxic links your website has.
These links can be removed from your site using the following methods
- To get rid of bad links, contact the website owner
- You can use the Google Disavow Tool to request that Google ignores your harmful backlinks. You can move them to your Disavow tab. Next, create a single file that contains all backlinks you don’t want Google to ignore. Finally, upload it to Google Disavow Tool.
We have disavowed a lot of harmful backlinks from BloggersPassion.
This is how it looks after they have been disavowed.
Note: Simply add your website to the Backlink Audit tool on Semrush and then run the campaign. You will receive a detailed report on your backlink profile, and it will show you any toxic links.
Safeguard Your Website From Hackers And Spammers
Protecting your site from hackers and malware is one of the easiest ways to avoid negative search engine optimization.
These are some things that you can do to protect your website from the most common security flaws.
- For website login, use a strong password (keep it changing regularly).
- Two-step authentication is a way to add extra security to your account if your password is stolen.
- Install security plugins like iThemes Security and Sucuri
- Backup your website regularly
One of the simplest ways to secure your site from all security threats is to use a superior web host like WPX Hosting.
Fight Against Scraped Content
Scrapped content can lead to cannibalization problems. You need to guard your site against imposters trying to scrape your content.
Copyscape can be used to periodically audit your website for duplicate content.
These are three easy ways to deal with scraped content.
Method 1: Contact your web hosting provider for assistance in removing the website.
You can contact the web hosting provider if you see any website publishing your content as if they were your own.
You can use ICANN Lookup to quickly find out where any website is hosted.
This is how it looks.
Once you find out the web host, you can contact their support team, provide your website details (along with their copied content URLs), and ask them to take that content down.
Method 2: Removing content on Google
You can also remove scraped Google search results.
You can use this link to report content you would like removed from Google’s services under applicable laws.
Method 3: Use the DMCA Takedown Service
One of the widely used ways to get rid of scraped content is to use DMCA services. If someone is scraping your site’s content, DMCA provides a paid takedown service.
The premium takedown service is $10/month or $100 per annum. However, it can be beneficial if you are facing infringement issues frequently.
Tools That’ll Help You Fight Against Negative SEO These Days
Until now, you might have gotten to know what fb the negative SEO is and how you can overcome it without any affection. But do you know that there are so many tools available that will work against negative SEO? Choosing the right one is very sensual, so we have our shelf handpicked couple of those that you should definitely try out during these days.
And moreover, they’re truly affordable, so you don’t have to worry about their pricing.
SEMRush
SEMRush is the #1 SEO toolkit that serves over 7 million people their services which is a huge number. I have been personally using it for a while to combat negative SEO. Apart from this, it also enriches your SEO rankings which makes it the perfect choice to choose.
Features Of SEMRush:
Semrush do offer an incredible amount of features, amongst which we have compiled a list of major ones that you need to know about, so here are they:
- Management of social media.
- Monitoring of brand.
- Research for the PPC.
- Site auditing.
- Keyword research.
- Analysis of backlinks.
- Organic research.
iThemes Security Pro
Do you know that over 30,000 WordPress websites get hacked each day, which is a huge number, and if you don’t care about the services you have enabled, you can get into the number?
So if you are having over this sentence, it is essential to add a security plugin that will highly impact new website security. Eventually, your website can be identified as growth enabled.
Features Of iThemes:
This plugin offers you varieties of features that are essential for you to know about:
- Enforcement of strong passwords.
- Scheduling of the database backup service.
- Changing the default URL of your wordpress login area.
- Change of file detection if someone manages to get it modified everything.
- Get the Gmail notification each time.
Final Verdict
It’s 2021, and most of the websites are getting hacked due to not taking care of their Security Services. Although most of the hosting provider is used to offering varieties of security norms like free SSL certification and malware protection, taking care of negative SEO is very important alongside.
We have been searching a lot about this norm and get to know that it is essential to take care of it at the very initial stage so that it won’t affect your website at any time. You can look up so many different factors, but we have compiled the list of best ways that might help you fight against negative SEO, so definitely check them out.
