Getting your website to rank #1 on the search engines is no mean feat. You can use services like LinkLifting to help boost your presence. It costs a lot of time and money on keyword research, content creation, on-site optimization, social media campaigns, and measurement. However, the investment pays off when you gain remarkable site traffic and increase your business profits.
Now imagine a situation where you are enjoying good traffic and related benefits. Then, you notice a sudden decline in your website traffic that has nothing to do with a search engine update. What just happened? There could be various reasons, among them a negative SEO attack.
Negative SEO attacks occur when malicious webmasters use black-hat SEO tactics to interfere with the ranks of other web pages on the SERPs. They do harmful activities such as website hacking, link farming, and submitting fake reviews to hurt your SEO and tarnish your business’s online reputation.
It is important to note that search engines such as Google have set measures to detect negative SEO attacks and protect your website from negative SEO. However, if you have a website online that you want to rank high on SERPs, it’s crucial to understand how negative SEO works, how to detect it, and what you can do to prevent its impact.
Negative SEO Tactics and How to Protect Your Website from Negative SEO
1: Low-quality links
Links are important ranking factors on search engines. However, not every link will boost your SEO ranks. A low-quality link comes from a non-authoritative website with content that does not match your site. Since search engines view back linking as a vote of confidence, poor links pointing at your content will hurt your SEO. With this in mind, spammers create thousands of low-quality websites with irrelevant content and link back to a target website.
It is helpful for businesses to note that it is possible to have poor links built by their SEO specialist who does not know how to pick the backlinks. The difference is that a planned attack will cause an unusual influx of spam links pointing to your website.
When your site has many low-quality links or anchor texts that are over-optimized, search engines will automatically flag them as spam. The web spam team or search engine algorithm might automatically penalize your site.
2: Website Hacking
There are different ways website hacking can occur. Hacking occurs when an unauthorized party accesses a website and takes control of it. A hacker can steal or change data, add malware or block you from accessing your website.
Website hacking affects SEO by increasing bounce rates. For instance, if the search engines notice a hacked site, they will warn visitors with a message like “this site may be hacked.” This act prevents most users from visiting the site. A high bounce rate and reduced traffic will lower the site’s SEO ranking.
Besides, a hacked website can tarnish your business reputation. Hackers can also choose to ruin your website’s ranking by carrying out negative on-page SEO, rewriting the content to inject toxic words, and other tactics to attract penalties from search engines.
When you decide to go online, take cyber security seriously. Implement measures to secure data and prevent your website from being hacked. Some cyber security measures include:
● Use backup for your website
● Updating plugins and other software regularly
● A site owner should buy an SSL certificate & install it on their website. This will help to prevent websites from getting hacked.
● Using security plugins for your CMS
3: Content scraping
Content scraping is the illegal act of copying content from a legitimate website and posting it on other sites without the knowledge or attribution to the owner. It could be intentional or not, but Google does not tolerate copying. Websites with similar content will cause the search engine to lower the rank of one that seems to have been copied. It is hard for Google to determine which website posted the content first. In case the scraped content appears on an authoritative site, your site might suffer since Google assumes a high authority website must own the content.
To catch this kind of negative SEO:
- Use a plagiarism checker such as Copyscape to check duplicate content or search it directly on Google. You must type a paragraph of your content on Google’s search bar and inspect the results for similarity.
- If there is plagiarism, ask the website with the stolen content to remove it.
- If this does not work, submit Google’s copyright removal form, asking them to intervene.
However, before you get there, prevent content scraping by:
● Adding media objects such as audio, images, and videos to your content. These make it difficult for content scrapers to succeed.
● Carrying out internal linking to enable you to identify track-backs from scrapers.
● Install CAPTCHA – content scrapers will have a hard time bypassing this.
4: Fake reviews
Search engines use customer reviews as important SEO ranking factors. As a result, businesses that want to boost local SEO ranking list their brands on platforms where they can receive customer reviews. However, a malicious competitor can use this opportunity to hurt the target business. They will create numerous user accounts and pose as customers to leave reviews on a business. To a search engine, this act may appear as a paid effort by the business to collect fake reviews and enhance its SEO ranking. Such an act will attract penalties by the search engine and may ban or suspend the company’s page and business listing.
It has proven that customer reviews and recommendations shape the opinion of prospective buyers. Therefore, fake reviews can fuel distrust in a business. In addition, fake reviews can be negative and fashioned to paint a bad picture about your products or services. Such will not only hurt your SEO but may also damage your business reputation.
It is easy to determine fake reviews when you use social media listening tools and monitor your business listings closely. When assessing reviews,
● Check the customer profile to see if it’s realistic
● Verify whether there are similar reviews posted on different platforms and the frequency
● Check the language – fake reviews may use inappropriate or wrong dialects.
● Check the content of the review – does it relate to your services or products?
Protect Your Website From Negative SEO
The best way to protect your website from negative SEO is by staying vigilant. Continuous monitoring will enable you to detect malicious activities in good time and counter them before they cause irreversible damage. Here are 3 measures you can take now to stay vigilant and catch attempts at negative SEO before they materialize.
1.Monitor Your Site Speed
It’s hard to detect something wrong with your website speed if you didn’t know how it worked previously. Regular monitoring helps you establish how various site speed parameters perform. You’ll establish your site’s standard load time for different resources and the number of HTTP requests. An abrupt change in these parameters will alarm you to scrutinize their behavior and its causes further.
Speed changes on a website could result from high HTTP requests and render-blocking code. Use crawling software to establish whether there’s any malicious activity leading to forceful crawling.
You can monitor your site using tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights and WebPage Test.
2. Upgrade Your Website Security with SSL Certificate
As mentioned earlier, cyber security measures are mandatory for any business with operations online. You need to protect your business data and that of customers dutifully. That’s why you should buy SSL certificate & install it on your website this will help to prevent website from getting hacked.
Securing your website with transport layer security not only protects against negative SEO but cyber-attacks as well.
The SSL will encrypt all the data exchanged on your website and add an “s” on your site’s URL (HTTPS). Customers will see that it’s a safe site and continue browsing, thus reducing the bounce rate. Besides, Google has added a website’s security to its list of ranking signals. Making your website HTTPS will therefore make it hard for cybercriminals to attack and boost your SEO ranking.
3. Conduct Regular Link Audits
The easiest way to discover spam links is by conducting regular link audits. You can manually check the health of your backlinks or use SEO/link audit tools. Beware of huge spikes and drops occurring when you aren’t doing any link building on your site.
If you think you are under an attack, write to Google to alert them and submit a Disavow file promptly so that you can salvage your site. You will discover suspicious activity fast and act before the issue blows out of control.
Conclusion
A negative SEO attack is costly. It can cause you to lose your website’s rank on SERPs, revenue, and business reputation. You also pay for restoring your website and business status to its former glory. Monitor your website ranking closely so that you can detect negative SEO attacks early and act promptly to counter them before they cause havoc.
