7 Ways to Protect Your Site from Negative SEO
In a perfect world, most companies will focus on their own websites and boost their products. However, that is not the case, as some competitors will resort to sabotage and negative SEO endorsement to get ahead.
As these deceptive links and tips get passed around the Internet, how can you protect yourself from falling for them and ruining your online traffic? Find out some protection tips to help you.
Negative SEO
The key to preventing any negative SEO from sabotaging your current website and ad strategies is to recognize which is which. You have to be vigilant enough to discern. A basic common characteristic among these attacks is the malicious intent behind them. These are the common ways they do it:
Hacking
Other websites will often hire hackers to get into your website and mess up your published content. These attacks can damage your site’s performance by making you undetectable and invisible to search engine algorithms.
Once they’ve entered and gained control, companies using negative SEO will then proceed to fabricate spam-like anchor texts and malevolent backlinks and will spread them all around your page. These links are numerous, which makes it even more difficult to sort them out.
Copy + Paste
Another way to decrease your website’s legitimacy is also through duplicates and clones. These fakes are then penalized and deemed untrustworthy by search engine algorithms. Not only that, but as they duplicate, negative SEO companies even alter your content to make it less credible and add in viruses too.
Fake Reviews and Reports
A more subtle way for them to create negative publicity for your site is by setting up fake accounts and dummy profiles. These profiles then proceed to creating negative reviews and spreading false rumours about your business and online content.
This will range from libellous verbal attacks, fictitious testimonies, and reporting you to search engines for violating certain protocols, they all do it anonymously and undetected. If you’re selling tree service in Markham, for example, they might post reviews that say that your trees are not in good shape or that you don’t have good customer service. As your reputation gets damaged, your online traffic will naturally drop as well.
False Correspondence
Backlinks are essential for increasing the trust that netizens and other websites put in you. However, negative SEO companies will take advantage of that trust by posing as your representative and directly contacting websites that have used your content as their backlink.
Once they’ve established a connection, these negative SEO strategists will then persuade the websites to remove your site and content from their backlinks and referrals, thus cutting your ties from the online community.
7 Protection Tips
Now that you’ve identified all these threats, you can then take on the challenge of keeping them at bay. They’ll keep trying to bring other websites down, but with these protection tips, you’ll be able to outsmart them. Start using the following tips:
Strengthen Security
Even the most affordable Toronto SEO companies will tell you that the first step to negative SEO protection is upgrading your security. This is done through encryption enhancement.
Your HTTPS should also be migrated as it may hold sensitive and confidential customer data that hackers can use. HTTPS encryption also serves as a signal to search engines that your website is trustworthy, thus increasing your ranking.
Run a SERP Ranking Check-up
The search engine results page or SERP is the record used by search engines to determine which sites possess the highest online traffic. Checking up on it can help you track your progress and also your competitors.
You don’t have to check it all the time, but doing it regularly can help you monitor whether any malicious attack has been done to your site. A sudden and unexplainable dip in ranking will often mean the application of negative SEO.
Once this happens, proceed to double-checking your site’s crawl stats. This can be found in Google’s Search Console but may vary for different search engines. To ensure that you have not been attacked make sure that robots.txt is still up and running.
Keep an Eye on Keyword CTR
Click-through rate (CTR) is a vital factor in determining your engagement efficiency with the public. It refers to how often a person responds to your Ad once they’ve seen it. Monitoring this statistic helps you discern whether you have been sabotaged or not.
However, keep in mind that an attack can still be made on your CTR via bots programmed to select keywords related to your business. These bots will then proceed to redirect them to your site and bounce them. This creates a flawed bounce rate record, which could deceive you on your next SEO upgrades.
Flag Down Fake Reviews
As mentioned earlier, fake testimonies are difficult to remove and identify. One way to keep an eye on them is through the Google My Business tool, which provides you with your social media interaction data. Here, you’ll be able to check and review any testimony written by bots and suspicious profiles and report them.
Look out for Plagiarism
Creating outstanding content is as difficult to make as it is rewarding. However, not all websites can create their own engineered content. So, what they do is “scrape” off your content and pass them off as your own.
Search engines will flag these websites including yours for plagiarism suspicions. You can stop this by using plagiarism checkers to detect any cheating sites. If any are found, you can simply report them to Google and fill out the form for Copyright Removal.
Site-Speed Inspections
Negative SEO companies will do site-speed attacks by employing forceful crawling, which induces a heavier server load that could lead to a website’s sluggish loading and inevitable crash.
The problem with site speed cyber-attacks is that they are not necessarily flagged down by search engines; rather a caution label that says your site could have been hacked will appear on your site, which warns netizens before they enter your page.
Audit Your Links
Link farming or spamdexing is one of the key methods that negative SEOs use to lessen your site’s credibility. Cyber attackers do this by changing and redirecting your content links to spammy content, or worse, transfer them to their own page.
Through regular link auditing, you can inspect your monthly growth and ranking and detect any sudden drops.
Businesses often go online to expand their customer reach and influence. Creating a website increases your chances of getting more exposure as billions of people daily interact on different social media platforms.
However, this influx of investment also comes with stiffer and rougher competition in the market. Unfortunately, some will employ underhanded tactics. Whether you’re selling sprinkler systems in Oakville or real estate in Toronto, it’s best to keep a keen eye on any malicious attacks or it may be too late to bounce back from it.
