Photo credit: Sammy Zimmermanns
It sounds like an Internet nightmare. A negative SEO attack causes your website’s search engine ranking to plunge.
Negative SEO consists of a collection of unethical practices designed to destroy a site’s search engine rankings. Google maintains the practice remains rare. However, digital marketing pundits warn that negative SEO attacks have become more common. It may even be an emerging trend.
Completing a successful attack requires advanced SEO skills. The most likely victims are businesses in lucrative, highly competitive niches. Competitors, mean-spirited hackers and anyone who holds a grudge against a business or brand can employ negative SEO to attack your website and diminish your Google search engine ranking. Small businesses are unlikely to suffer a negative SEO attack.
Here’s how negative SEO works.
Google now penalizes sites with large numbers of low-quality, quickly assembled backlinks.
In response, black hat SEO practitioners switched tactics and now point spam backlinks at others’ websites in an effort to prompt Google to penalize the site. Other negative SEO tricks include reposting a site’s content multiple times around the Internet, creating bogus social media profiles to damage a reputation, hacking a website, and removing a site’s strongest backlinks. Fortunately, tools are available to fight back against these black techniques.
Monitor your backlinks. Use tools such as Open Site Explorer, ahrefs, or even Google Webmaster tools to monitor your backlink profile. KISSmetrics recommends MonitorBacklinks.com. A sudden spike in backlinks is cause for concern. Beware links filled with words like Viagra or online poker and large numbers of links from overseas. Don’t fret over a handful of questionable links. An SEO penalty requires a large number.
Set up email alerts. Google can send you an email alert if it manually penalizes your site, if your site is attacked by malware, or is suffering other problems. Go to Google Webmaster Tools Preferences and enable email notifications.
Protect your strong backlinks. Negative SEO players can impersonate you to request webmasters to remove links to your site. To prevent this, always use an email from your domain, not an email address from a Gmail, Yahoo or other free service, when communicating with webmasters. In addition, keep tabs on your best backlinks with a backlink monitoring tool.
Watch for duplication. Black hat SEO players can scrape your content and repost it on hundreds of different sites to hurt your rankings. Use Copyscape.com to monitor the Internet for unapproved duplicate content. You can add either your website or the text an article to CopyScape to find where your content is being published.
Monitor social media mentions. An enemy can create fake social media accounts that impersonate your organization and damage its reputation. The key is to spot the perpetrators before they gain many followers. Then, report them to the social media network as frauds. Use a tool like CyberAlert Buzz that can immediately inform you of mentions of your organization or brand in social media. Be sure to monitor social media for your brand’s nicknames, abbreviations and names of top executives.
Disavow links. Disavow spammy backlinks with the Disavow Tool in your Google Webmaster account. Some digital experts recommend disavowing links only if you’ve received a penalty or email warning from Google. In a recent YouTube video, however, Google’s Matt Cutts encouraged webmasters to disavow links whenever they wish.
Bottom Line: Even if negative SEO attacks may still be rare, prudence calls for organizations to be on guard against malevolent attacks aimed at destroying their search engine ranking. Businesses can watch for the attacks by monitoring their backlinks and social media mentions and take counter actions before they suffer underserved search engine penalties.
Resources
Spotting the Tell-Tale Signs of Negative SEO
Business 2 Community
How to Protect Your Website from Negative SEO
KISSmetrics
Negative SEO: Have Mercenaries Been Hired To Torpedo Your Search Rankings?
Forbes
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
fighting back negative SEO is an important task for bringing forward in google page for website.Thank you for bringing notice the important thing.
Good article. Found a few questionable links with poor spam scores that may have contributed, but my ranking is still pretty bad and I just can’t figure out why. I’ve dropped 7 spots since last year and no amount of seo seems to fix it.