So, you’re a business owner or a digital marketer striving to maintain a robust online presence. Your efforts have been consistent, your content is engaging, and your SEO strategy is on point.
Yet, the results have disappointed you.
- There is a decline in your search rankings
- There is a drop in traffic
- There is a dip in sales
The culprit could be negative SEO.
Negative SEO attacks can be formidable adversaries, causing traffic loss, damaging your brand reputation, and declining business revenue. Proactive vigilance is essential to safeguarding your website and sustaining growth.
The good news is that you can correct your SEO strategies to reverse the impact. However, you must equip yourself with the knowledge to combat the dark side of SEO and protect your search engine rankings.
At Mavlers, we recognize these threats and have the expertise to help you navigate the murky waters of negative SEO. By understanding its impact and implementing robust monitoring strategies, you can maintain your search rankings and drive success.
If you’re ready to combat negative SEO, here’s the Table of Contents you will want to follow.
Recognizing the signs of a negative SEO attack
9 Steps to mitigate a negative SEO attack
How do you recover from an unethical ranking sabotage?
Preventive best practices to safeguard your site
By the end of this blog, you’ll have all the information you need to defend your site against negative SEO. Let’s delve into why vigilance is crucial and how you can protect your online presence.
What is negative SEO?
Negative SEO is using unfair means by your competitors to harm your position on a search engine result page. It comprises link spamming, content scraping, and unwanted activities undermining a site’s credibility with search engines. These techniques are known as ‘black hat’ strategies. If not detected in time, things can go from bad to worse.
Here are five types of negative SEO attacks you may come across.
1. Backlink spam
Backlink spam occurs when a person or an SEO company directs many poor-quality, unrelated, or toxic backlinks to a competitor’s website. This tactic may give the target site the appearance of manipulative SEO, which will probably lead to a penalty.
2. Content scraping
Content scraping is copying content from an original website and posting it on other websites without permission. The strategy’s primary purpose is to make pushing down the original content easy by generating duplicate content penalties.
3. Site hacking and malware injection
In even more severe cases, attackers may physically compromise your site and inject malicious code. These violations misuse the site’s security and lower its overall quality and user experience.
4. Fake reviews and social attacks
Your competitors also leave fake reviews about your website, which can tarnish your brand reputation. These poor ratings cast your business in a negative light.
5. Click fraud and bounce rate manipulation.
Some competitors may use bots to create traffic that bounces back or even fake clicks. They want to give an impression of a poor engagement rate on your website. These tactics could hurt a site’s SEO standings since high bounce rates indicate that the site contains low-quality content.
Now, let’s see how we can identify these negative SEO attacks.
Recognizing the signs of a negative SEO attack
The earlier you identify negative SEO attacks on your website, the sooner you can significantly improve your keyword rankings and user engagement. The key is to minimize the damage as much as possible.
Here are a few indicators of negative SEO.
- You witness a sudden drop in your website’s organic traffic. The possible reasons could be toxic backlinks or duplicate content. And in the eyes of search engines, these are manipulative tactics.
- Your site experiences an unexpected spike in spammy backlinks or links from unrelated sites.
- Your site loading speed has suddenly slowed down, and you’re receiving frequent security warnings. Because of these factors, search engines may deprioritize your site.
- Your website is experiencing high bounce rates and a decrease in engagement rates.
Now, let’s find out how to stop these negative SEO attacks once and for all.
6 Steps to mitigate a negative SEO attack
You need to take proactive and strategic steps to manage a website that is effectively free from negative SEO attacks. Here are six steps to mitigate these attacks.
1. Regularly audit your backlink profile
Performing constant backlink checks is crucial because it allows you to control the quality of links that follow your website. Bad links from other unsafe or irrelevant websites may harm the health of your site’s SEO.
You can use Ahrefs or SEMrush to perform a backlink analysis on your website. This enables you to recognize such links at an early stage and disavow or remove them.
2. Set up Google Alerts
Using Google Alerts is a relatively easy way of tracking strange occurrences regarding your site. This is useful when your brand or domain is mentioned online. You’ll get a notification when it happens. You can also easily monitor for any strange activity. These alerts can be useful for detecting fake reviews, content scraping, or spammy link-building.
3. Strengthen your site security
Every site owner understands the importance of safeguarding the site from attacks such as hacking and malware injections. Ensure the web addresses have HTTPS at the front and use strong and different passwords.
Also, ensure that your plugins and themes are updated whenever you install them on your website.
4. Disavow all the toxic links
If you see many low-quality backlinks, you can use the Google Disavow Tool as a guide to tell Google to ignore them. Start with the backlinks list in Google Search Console or an external software and look for the toxic links that can lead to your site.
After the identification, make a disavow file with those links and submit it through the Google Disavow Tool.
5. Contact the webmasters directly for link removal
Although you may find disavowal useful, informing webmasters to remove the links is more effective. Use the contact details of the site’s webmaster to scrub out each spammy or irrelevant link and politely tell him or her to do it.
This helps in backlink profile cleanup and can prevent the source from feeding more spam links in the future.
6. Check out for content scraping
Content scraping is how other people place your content on their sites or other blogs. Their objective is to confuse Google about who the original creator is. To counter this, file a DMCA takedown notice to Google, which will lessen any copied content from the search engine.
This helps protect your site from penalties due to duplicate content. If the scraping continues more intensively, legal advice should be sought to investigate other possibilities.
How do you recover from an unethical ranking sabotage?
After removing negative SEO, restoring the website takes time to get its SEO in shape again and regain Google’s trust.
Here is what you can do to get back on track.
Rebuild trust with Google and your users
- Go to the Google Search Console, and in the “Manual Actions” section, submit a reconsideration request to Google explaining the actions you have taken to address the SEO-related problems with your website.
- Next, you must focus on restoring your site’s security and speed. Optimize your site’s performance using caching, image optimization, and efficient hosting.
Monitoring your site’s performance post-recovery
- Track your website’s performance metrics, such as rankings, traffic, bounce rate, etc., to ensure that your recovery efforts are effective. Also, track any fluctuations in your keyword ranking.
- Regularly update your CMS, plugins, and themes, as outdated softwares invite vulnerabilities.
Preventive best practices to safeguard your site
Prevention is better than cure. So, we have rounded up three ways in which you can safeguard your site from any kind of negative SEO attacks.
1. By building a strong backlink profile
Try earning high-quality backlinks naturally instead of buying paid links. Reach out to webmasters through outreach emails. Also, diversify the anchor texts from link sources to ensure that your readers are aware of them when clicking on a link.
2. By strengthening your website’s security
Implement the best security measures like firewall and CAPTCHA for a safe login process.
3. By educating your team on maintaining SEO hygiene
Provide your SEO team with training on how to prevent accidental vulnerabilities. Ask them to generate consistent reports to monitor your site’s health.
Wrapping up
To eliminate negative SEO attacks from the roots, you must be cautious about the SEO techniques you’re implementing. Although avoiding malicious and unethical practices would help your cause, the strategies we discussed in this article will help you recover from the damage that has already been done.
Here are some more reads that will help you be more informed if you’d like to consider.
Related Articles You May Find Useful
How to Manage Duplicate Content Issues in SEO
Facing a Drop in Backlink Quality? How to Clean Up Your Profile and Reclaim Authority
Ahmad Jamal - Content Writer
Ahmad works as a content writer at Mavlers. He’s a computer engineer obsessed with his time, a football enthusiast with an MBA in Marketing, and a poet who fancies being a stage artist. Entrepreneurship, startups, and branding are his only love interests.
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