Are you working hard to get top ranking on Google search engine but not getting desired results? Or is your website facing a sudden fall in the ranking? This may be due to the effect of bad SEO practices or negative SEO attacks. It not only can affect your website ranking but is also responsible for lower website traffic.
Negative SEO services is when someone tries to lower a website ranking on search engine pages through various negative SEO strategies, including building spam links, uploading spammy content, or writing negative reviews on multiple platforms. Google detects these negative SEO practices and downgrades the website on search engines. A marketer can practice many other negative SEO strategies to lower their competitor’s website on SERPs. But before moving further, let’s first discuss how negative SEO works.
How does negative SEO work?
Negative SEO is a strategic search engine optimization practice that can affect your brand reputation in many ways. Marketers use negative SEO strategies to lower their competitors’ websites and boost the ranking of their client’s websites ranking on search engines. There are different forms of SEO practices we have listed below. Check them out!
Website Hacking
Website hacking is the most dangerous negative SEO practice where professional hackers hack your website to disappear from search engines or negatively affect your business reputation. How would you know your website is hacked? If your website suddenly disappears from search engines or starts linking to spammy sites. A hacked website also starts experiencing lower engagement and website traffic comparatively. If your website also experiences a sudden fall in website traffic and lower engagement, you must pay special attention because it may be suspicious of negative SEO.
Harmful Spammy Links
Creating harmful spammy links is the most effective and common way to ruin your website’s reputation on digital platforms. Suppose someone linked your website domain to a website containing irrelevant content or vulgar content. It will increase your website spam score and affect your website credibility and reliability. Websites with spammy links start experiencing lower traffic and engagement rate or also lead to higher bounce rates. The effect of spammy links is not sudden but can affect your website for the long term. If you notice a sudden spike in the spam score of your website, then call an SEO company before it’s too late.
Negative Reviews with Spammy Links
Negative reviews are also a part of negative SEO attacks. Monthly or Yearly SEO services for marketers mostly use negative reviews on their competitive sites to affect the credibility of their sites. These comments sometimes include spammy or irrelevant links, increasing your website spam score and affecting your website authority. Receiving reviews in bulk on your site can also improve your website spam score. Local businesses or small businesses who are receiving fake or bad reviews on their site hardly rank on search engine pages. This is why you need to keep an eye on each comment you’re receiving and remove them if it’s affecting your website ranking or business credibility.
Content Scraping
Content plays a key role for both white hat SEO as well as black hat SEO. It not only helps increase your website credibility but also ruins your website reliability is not used well. Content scraping (copying) is the most traditional negative SEO technique. In this technique, marketers copy the same content and post them on various other sites. It will lead to plagiarised content. Google notices this duplicate content and penalizes the sites containing duplicate content, de-index the site, and affects the website ranking on search engine pages.
How to detect negative SEO attacks?
- A sudden drop of search engine rankings of particular keywords
- Website experiencing lower website traffic than normal
- A sudden increase in spam score and decrease website traffic
- The high number of blocked links
- Suddenly receiving comments with spammy links
- Decrease in quality backlinks of your website.
- Bad server connectivity
All these are the most common SEO signals with the help of that you can detect if your website is experiencing SEO attacks. You can analyze these negative SEO impacts on google analytics metrics and take help from SEO experts.
How to Deflect Negative SEO Attacks?
There are many ways to deflect SEO attacks and regain your website reputation. We have listed some of the most common strategies you can perform to reduce the impact of negative SEO attacks.
Make quality backlinks on relevant sites
Quality backlinks increase website credibility, relevance and help to get a higher ranking on search engine pages. Creating quality backlinks on relevant websites with high authority helps reduce your site’s spam score and make your website search engine friendly. Authority websites rank higher on search engine pages and attract more organic traffic.
Update your website content
Protect website content from scrapping, and it is recommended to check and update your content regularly. Website content upgrade increases the content quality of your site and increases the authority of your site. Google will notice your authority on your site is genuine and prioritize your site on search engine pages.
Delete spam comments
As we mentioned above, irrelevant comments with spammy links can ruin your site authority. If your website is facing this issue below your blogs or articles, remove them immediately. You can disavow these spammy links with relevant quality links. You can disavow low-quality links with google disavow tools by just filling in their specifications and registration process. It will remove all the low-quality spammy links from your site and increase the quality of your site, more high-quality links and better search engine ranking.
Perform a regular website audit
Regular website audit reports help you track weak points on your site and detect the flaws in the website. As an SEO analyst, it is crucial to keep upgrading your website credentials and follow your site’s performance so that you can make changes as soon as any errors are detected. With the audit report, you can check the spam score, conversions rate, search engine rankings and also identify if negative SEO is happening with your site. Then you can be safe from negative SEO attacks.
Conclusion:
SEO is a very effective digital marketing strategy to increase the presence of your site. At times, the industries are fighting aggressively to get the top positions on search engines and practice all the possible strategies to achieve desired positions on SERPs, and negative SEO is one of them. So, it becomes very crucial to practice all the necessary precautions if you want to play safe and get top on google. Let me know if you find this information helpful and effective for your business growth.
