What the negative SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is?
Most of the best SEO companies are familiar with the term ‘negative SEO’ yet very few know what actually it covers. Negative SEO can be done in different forms such as unnatural links or to filled competitors site with five rating reviews unnaturally to give negative effect to their ranking in search engine results. When search engine robots crawl the site they take it as unnatural or paid reviews, then there is a possibility that the site having unnatural link or unnatural reviews can be penalized.
Negative SEO is done from outside targeting site to decrease competitors: page rank, so that your ranking can move up in SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Now a days many blackhat SEO are adopting black hat techniques to get the top rankings quickly but ultimately it results in bringing down your website in the rankings or to make your site completely out of search results.
How do they do it?
There are many ways that blackhat SEO use. One of them perhaps most easy and popular tactic is
Paid links– They overload competitors site with lots of outside links. When lots of links suddenly appears on the site it gives an impression of negative SEO that you are trying to divert traffic towards your site unnaturally and has more chances to be penalized by Google algo.
Steal the content from the website before crawlers crawl and can index your site. If content can be stolen before it is indexed, the algo takes original site as it has duplicate content and came under Google radar and gets penalized.
The most negative and dirty SEO technique is DMCA removal request– What they do to accomplish this work is they take site’s most natural and valuable backlinks and sending an email to the webmaster that the page they are linked are doing copyright violation and their links should be removed immediately.
Change in Robot.txt File– Sometimes spammer got loose point in your site security and change the site content or can change your robot.txt file or can obstruct all IPs of a certain page so that search engine can’t find your site or pages.
Cross site scripting– Sometime spammer injects malicious script by using cross-site scripting (XSS). With the help of this script spammer can change the content, means when some user click on the site link he get the message that there are no results for XXXXX instead of the content of the site. When Google picks this link up it will flag your site as infected and might remove it from search results.
How to uncover negative SEO ?
it’s not easy to uncover negative SEO all the times and no particular technique is available. One thing that you can do is take precautions. Before all this you should understand that
A site with strong domain authority has fewer chances of negative SEO tactics.
Monitoring SEO techniques that can easily be used is highly recommended.
Since negative SEO is highly risky so legitimate business would not like to take the risk.
Although it’s not possible to be spam proof but there are some steps that you can take to put the risk of spam at bay-
Monitor incoming links – there are many tools available in the market to help you to accomplish this task. Linksearchtools.com is one of the tools. It has a cool feature for this. With the help of this tool you can detect the spammy links at an early stage and might find the culprit who is doing it and can stop them. Keep an eye on the backlinks from gambling, adult, and other illicit types of websites, Links from foreign language sites, may be spammy links but it’s always not necessary that all such types of links are spammy.
Solid SEO foundation – if you have a website with solid SEO techniques you can constantly monitoring important ranking metrics for foul play and you will have less chances being hit by negative SEO.
Disavow Links tool you can find this tool within your Google Webmaster Tools account, can be used to create files that let Google know which backlinks you suspect come from spammers. But before you choose this tool Google ask you to confirm a notice advising you that if you are confirmed that you have considerable spammy and artificial or low quality links pointing to your site only then choose this tool otherwise it can harm your ranking in search results. In next step Google will ask you to upload text file that you suspect have links that you would like Google to ignore.
But first you will have to create disavow.txt file that should contain three information first full URLs of particular pages, second full domain or subdomains you would like to block and third comment on your link devaluation requests following a # character
If you find it necessary start removing these bad links if possible. You can take help of various tools such as linkdetox tool, link cleanup and contact tool etc. And finally we can say that there is no predefined list of negative SEO tactics. They detect your site’s weakness and exploit it.
As the saying goes Prepare and Prepare rather than Repair and Repent- so best work is having a website with a solid foundation means solid and legitimate SEO, regular monitoring of ranking metrics, an honest relationship with Google can help you to be negative SEO safe.
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About us – Semseogurus.com is an Interactive Internet marketing Company providing SEO, PPC, SMO, Link building, Reputation management services. We are an ethical SEO company with focus on providing ‘result oriented’ services to our clients.