How to Guard Against Negative SEO

Connectica • December 1, 2014 • SEO

seo

Read Time: 3 minutes

With all the time, effort and money you have put into building your website, developing your online presence and implementing good SEO tactics the last thing you need is someone sabotaging your hard work and investment with negative SEO.

What is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO is a method of sabotaging the search engine rankings of a competitor site through the use of unethical or ‘black hat’ techniques. There are many various forms of negative SEO, and attacks can include things like:

Website hacking
The creation of copious amounts of spam links to your website
The duplication and distribution of your content across the net
Making use of particular keywords such as Viagra, poker online, and payday loans to point bad links to your website
Reputation damage through fake profiles on social media networks
Removing the good backlinks to your website

How real is the threat to you?
While negative SEO may sound quite complicated and require a lot of time, effort and technical knowledge that most people just don’t possess, a quick search on Fivrr will reveal tens of thousands of people willing to do it for $5. Thus you should quickly realize that if you have any competitors in your industry itching for that top spot, the threat of negative SEO becomes very real. Furthermore, if your website and online presence has been in operation for a relatively decent amount of time, you may have even fallen prey to a degree of self induced negative SEO. Self induced negative SEO sounds like a terrible contradiction, but the reality is that it happens all the time. All too often we see well meaning business owners trying to boost their search engine rankings by either employing cheap SEO companies, enlisting the help of an employee or friend, or even hitting up a Google search and trying a little of self taught DIY search engine optimization.

How can you guard against Negative SEO?
With so many avenues for sabotage, the question is how can you guard your website against negative SEO? The first thing you can do is to enlist the help of an expert SEO company. While you may be tempted to try and fix the mess of negative SEO in house, you wouldn’t trust yourself to perform open heart surgery or rewire the entire electrics of your home would you? With the state of today’s economic environment many people feel that hiring an SEO company is a waste of money, but the reality is that they are the experts in this area. Just as a heart specialist knows about hearts and electricians know about wiring, Search Engine Optimization companies know about Search Engine Optimization and sorting out negative SEO. Just remember that you will get exactly what you pay for – while hiring the cheapest SEO company may seem like a good idea and a quick fix, be aware that more often than the seemingly good prices come at a huge cost in the long term. Search Engine Optimization is important for all website owners and having a good SEO company at your side is a long term investment in the growth of your website and business.

Once you have found a SEO company that you can trust there are a number of things that you can expect them to do to help guard you against negative SEO:
1. Setting up of the Google Webmaster Tools Email Alerts: Google Webmaster Tools will send out an alert when malware is attacking your website, there are server connectivity issues, your pages are not being indexed, and if Google sends you a manual penalty.
2. Keeping a record of all your backlinks: A good SEO company will be able to provide you with a detailed list of the backlinks that are created for your site. While this may seem like a list of gibberish to you, it is one of the most time consuming yet important jobs that your SEO experts will implement to guard against negative SEO. By having someone personally monitoring your backlinks they will create strong, good backlinks to your site as well as be able to spot any strange or bad backlink creation.
3. Protect your strongest backlinks: Your strong backlinks are the ones that actively work toward improving your search rankings. Losing these can be a huge setback to your rankings. Having an expert monitor your strongest backlink protects them form being removed by would be saboteurs and competitors.
4. Protect your original content from duplication: Duplicate content is a common technique used to sabotage reputation. Having your content duplicated and flagrantly reposted across the web hundreds of times over can be seen as spam and could lead to your site being penalized by Google.

There are many other methods of guarding against negative SEO. By investing your trust with an established and experienced SEO company such as Connectica Inc, you should be able to keep your rankings and online presence secure. It is important that you understand that achieving high rankings does not happen over night – implementing good SEO techniques is a marathon that needs patience.

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