Are You A Victim Of Negative SEO?
Digital marketing is a tricky business – and search engine optimization is one of the hardest pieces to master. Good SEO requires that you communicate to the search engines your intentions so they can recommend your website for relevant searches. But did you know that there is such a thing as negative SEO?
Negative SEO is on the rise and is a threat to your organic search traffic. Essentially negative SEO is when a competitor will use a variety of tricks to make Google, Bing or Yahoo! think that their website is more relevant than yours.
So how does this happen? A competitor used to use “Black hat SEO” to trick search engines into making their website to appear on the first page of search results. They would overuse keywords in their content to buying backlinks. Google caught on and started penalizing website owners that participated in those practices.
Now that these penaltities are in place, some website owners are resorting to negative SEO tactics against their competitors. Here is a list of negative SEO tactics that are being commonplace in today’s competitive digital world:
- Hacking – entering a website through the CMS (content management system) to remove content or by adding irrelevant content to a site.
- Sending Spammy Links – when a rival will purchase backlinks and send them to a competitior’s webiste. Google will think the competitor’s site is involved in “Black Hat SEO” and penalize them.
- Using Malicious Anchor Text -when a rival will link your site to a less reputable site like online gambling or porn.
- Plagarisim – when a rival blatantly copies your content and passes it off as their own.
- Sending out the Bots – a Bot will infiltrate a site and take control of the website structure and damage the existing SEO standing.
- Backlink Removal – a rival will pretend to be from your company asking to remove the link from your site.
As a website owner there are various ways to deal with negative SEO.
- Use Google’s disavow tool. The tool lets a site owner tell Google that they don’t want some for their links from external sites to be counted as part their page rank.
- Website Security. One of the biggest threats to your website is hacking and bots. Krack Media offers a security plan, where our staff will routinely check your site for malicious behavior.
- Protect your links, make sure when you are dealing with high ranking sites the email address is connected to your domain. Our staff routinely assists people with running a backlink analysis to see which links are performing the best and to make sure nothing has been removed.
- Watch out for plagiarism. A great tool to use to search to see if your content has been copied is Copyscape. You simply put in your website address and the site will scan the internet to see if your content appears elsewhere. Google has stiff penalties against site that post plagiarized content.
- Search social networks. See if a rival is spreading negative comments on the networks and your profiles.
Our staff can help you with developing a positive SEO plan and to deal with negative SEO, if the need arises. For more information visit our Security and Maintenance plan page or Request a Quote and one of our staff will contact you. We look forward to working with you.
