SEO is constantly evolving which prompts businesses to adapt its algorithm changes. Getting to the top of search results is a more challenging feat compared to before.
Ranking your website requires well-thought strategies in keyword research, content marketing, on-page optimization, and link building. In brief, SEO is a time-consuming process that requires a holistic approach.
Nevertheless, there are those who cut the process short and resort to bad practices - negative SEO tactics. Negative SEO is aimed at tearing down the competition through questionable strategies.
Businesses who unwittingly engage in negative SEO practice experience a dip in their ranking, and worst, potentially increase their website being shut down. In this post, we will discuss how negative SEO can affect your business, what you can do when your business gets affected by negative SEO, and the legality of negative SEO.
Negative SEO refers to the practice of employing black hat and unethical strategies to sabotage a competition in search rankings. Although most negative SEO strategies are intentional, some companies unknowingly engage in poor SEO tactics only to discover their traffic tanking.
What is Negative SEO?
These strategies involve linking to low-quality websites, stuffing content with irrelevant keywords, or generating bad links.
Types of Negative SEO Attacks
- Link Farming - A link farm is any website that is created for the sole purpose of improving another website's PageRank through linking to the website from a variety of web pages in the link farm. Since link farms are spammy and have unrelated links, search engine prohibits this practice.
- Duplicate content - Using the same content and publishing it on multiple websites is the easiest way for search engines to penalize your website.
- Fake Social Media Profiles- Your competition can post negative reviews on your social media accounts using fake profiles.
- De-indexing website - This involves changing the robots.txt file from your server to remove you from search.
- Inserting Malware - Google may warn users that your website may be hacked if malware attacks your website. This can negatively affect your traffic.
- Forceful crawling - Crawling your website forcefully slows down your website that can lead to crashing your website. This can decrease your ranking or even de-ranking your website.
Should you worry about negative SEO?
It is best to prevent its impact instead of fixing it. Webmasters can deal with the negative SEO's impact on your website via Google's Disavow Tool but it can take time to rescind the effect.
Malicious hackers could use different tactics to attack your website. You can protect your website ranking using the following tips:
Is it possible to face legal charges if your website takes a financial hit from negative SEO? The answer depends on the manner in which the negative SEO has been deployed, the country's laws, the ability to determine offenders and their location, and your ability to prove your loss.
How to Protect Your Website Against Negative SEO Attacks
- Conduct Website Audit - Regular website audit allows you to check malicious links.
- Stay on top of Google Search Console Email notification - Enabling Google Search Console notification allows you to stay on top of your website activities. You can also incorporate more advanced strategies to such as monitoring website backlinks, or removing malicious backlinks, and protecting your website from malware/hackers.
- Monitor your backlinks - Use tools to monitor your backlinks and weed out those that are not relevant to your website. Take note of important links and get alerts if these links are removed from your website. You can reach out to webmasters to restore the links so you don't harm your backlink profile.
- Strengthen your website security - Increase your website's security measures by using a strong admin password, change the password regularly, employ two-step authentication, update your website, and installing security plugins. Establishing an automatic backup system. Installing automatic backup is also essential to avoid data loss.
- Check for duplicate content - Run your content on plagiarism tools such as Grammarly to find copies of your content on other websites.
- Stay alert on your social mentions - Always stay on top of your social media administration. Use tools to collate all the mentions from your social pages so you stay alert whenever your profile is mentioned. Address any concerns whenever you are mentioned to manage your reputation and protect your brand.
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Spammy links won't have as much impact on your website as your backlink profile increases. However, it is always best to err on the side of caution. If you find your website is linked to a lot of low-quality links, you can consider using these actions:
- Link removal - this also involves reaching out to webmasters to take down the link manually. While others do it free, some site owners ask for a fee. Use domain email address so the website owners can identify that you own the website.
- Disavow links - You can disavow links through Google Console. Google provides instructions on how to disavow links. It is best to disavow links only if you cannot reach out to the website owners.
The legality of Negative SEO
Pursuing legal actions towards negative SEO can be challenging considering that it is quite rare to determine the perpetrator. You also need to ensure you have resources (time and money) since litigation and dispute resolution could be time-consuming and expensive.
You can follow the tips above to remedy the impact of negative SEO instead of pursuing legal action so you can focus on growing your businesses. You can also do a DMCA takedown request if you cannot reach out to a website owner and wanted to remove malicious and duplicate content.
You can follow the tips above to remedy the impact of negative SEO instead of pursuing legal action so you can focus on growing your businesses. You can also do a DMCA takedown request if you cannot reach out to a website owner and wanted to remove malicious and duplicate content.
You can avoid or manage being attacked by malicious hackers by building established and holistic SEO strategies or working with trusted SEO providers. Hiring a trusted third party legal SEO provider allows you to focus on your business while you grow your traffic online.