Introduction
With more and more businesses taking the digital landscape, it is only natural that they will need to compete against each other to take the top spots on the search engine rankings.
But like any war, some competitors will use underhanded tactics to get the upper hand in the market. And when the online market is concerned, Negative SEO is one such tactic.
While SEO is an effective way to market your brand and business, you might fall for negative SEO practices if you are not careful enough. And when that happens, all your SEO efforts will become null. Worst case scenario – your website will be banned completely.
Seeing how important it is for marketers to be wary of Negative SEO. We are here with this guide. This guide will try to highlight some of the best ways to protect your online assets.
What Is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO is the act of using Blackhat SEO to boost search engine rankings. Black hat SEO are the unethical SEO practices that might help you with instant tent traffic and brand recognition.
However, when search engines become aware of the unethical practices, your website can be taken down almost instantly.
When you start with SEO, you might not come across this term. These negative SEO attacks can take any of the following forms.
- Receiving numerous spammy links from other websites.
- Perhaps your website has been hacked.
- Creation of fake social media profiles to damage your reputation.
Even though black hat SEO is becoming hard to execute today, competitors will always be willing to take that risk.
How To Protect Your Website From Negative SEO?
While you are doing SEO for your website, it is really difficult to see ant Negative SEO. However, you can do a few things to avoid any negative SEO effects on your website.
1. Defending Against Fake Backlink Removal Request
You always need to track your best-performing backlinks. Your competitors are following your best links and trying their best to somehow remove them. One of the most used methods is Backlinks Removal Request.
Your competitor might mail you and try to convince you to remove the link by warning you. They might pitch you as experts and show some threat about that link having a negative SEO effect. It is better that you download a backlink checker tool from thepirateproxybay.com and track your best links’ performance.
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2. Fighting Against Scrapped Content
The online industry is run by high-quality content. This is one aspect you can never go wrong with. Make one mistake, and all your effort can go in vain.
Among all the things that you need to protect your website from is scrapped content. Scrap content leads to cannibalization. This happens when someone uses your content and publishes it on their website.
If you ever find someone using your content to publish on their website, you can get their contact info and mail them to remove it. If they do not offer compliance, you can always complain to Google’s Copyright Removal Form.
3. Protecting Your Website From Hackers
One of the simplest forms of protecting your website is safeguarding it from hackers and malware attackers. Here are a few things you can do to secure the website.
- Use strong login passwords.
- Always have two-step authentication.
- Install security plugins.
- Ensure a regular data backup.
4. Routinely Search For Duplicate Content
Quality Content is a hallmark of top-notch SEO.
Websites with high-quality articles relevant to what your audiences are looking for will rank higher. On the other side, Google frowns upon websites that offer content without any intention.
This one is easy to detect. Use a plagiarism checker tool to ensure every content published on your website is original and unique.
Conclusion
Today, negative SEO is rare, especially when Google is fighting it every day. However, you can’t deny that it still exists. It still exists and is a real danger for businesses that rely on negative SEO to boost their online presence.
By keeping track of the things we mentioned above, you will be able to identify negative SEO practices and stop any irreplaceable damage from happening.
