What is Negative SEO
Negative SEO refers to tactics and strategies designed to harm competitors’ rankings and reduce their organic traffic. Businesses deliberately implement black-hat SEO techniques on the websites of their competitors in order to undermine their SEO efforts.
Let’s investigate how rivals do this and how to counter these harmful SEO attacks.
Negative SEO Types
Over time, negative SEO has evolved. It began with back links, in which site owners listed their competitors’ links to terrible, poisonous websites. This resulted in spammy links, which could be fixed by including them in the disavow file.
However, there are numerous ways for attackers to execute bad SEO in 2020. It is considerably more serious in the current situation, and it is also difficult to identify.
Attackers utilize both off-page and on-page SEO practices to harm their competitors’ rankings and organic traffic. To keep you aware and secure from such attacks, we have created a list of such negative SEO techniques.
Adverse Off-Page SEO
This involves assailants employing off-page SEO techniques to harm the rankings of a website. They are primarily focused on generating harmful backlinks to the website.
Link Farming
Everyone is aware of this gray hat SEO technique. Allow me to provide an overview of link farms. Link farms are collections of interconnected, comparable websites. The sole purpose of these websites is to provide links that will increase the visibility of specific pages on your website. Site owners utilized link farms to boost their page rank and obtain high SERP rankings. In 2012, however, the Penguin algorithm of Google severely penalized such websites. This brought an end to link farms.
Attackers use this method to direct a large number of spammy links from link farms to a target website.Google notices this activity, which causes a sudden decline in the targeted website’s ranking.
Advice For Recovering From This
Let us be honest! Without our permission, our competitors are sending these hurried backlinks.However, it would be prudent to regularly examine the backlinks to identify such malicious connections.
Keep an eye out for backlinks with a very high toxic score and submit them to the disavow list. This disavow list must then be submitted via the search console to Google. Google will then disassociate your website from these spammy connections. This will assist your website in recovering from these assaults and maintaining its keyword rankings.
Bad Reviews
This raises the level of jealousy significantly. Competitors go so far as to collaborate with individuals and groups to produce fictitious reviews about your company. Due to the negative perception your firm receives from Google, this has a substantial impact on the SERP presence of your website. Unfavorable 1-star reviews also have an effect on your local SEO rankings.This has the potential to be quite dangerous. Customers may begin to lose faith in your brand.
How To Bounce Back From This
When it comes to bogus reviews, Google is really tough. Additionally, they have a rule in place that forbids purchased reviews.
You can check the ratings your business is getting by logging into your Google My Business account. Watch out for any illogical or phony reviews. As soon as you come across such reviews, be sure to mark them. You will need to complete a brief report, and once you do, Google will delete these phony reviews from your listings.
Extracting Content
This black-hat SEO technique entails scraping (copying) your website’s content and posting it on multiple other websites. This results in content duplication. In the past, site proprietors were able to get away with using this technique to rank higher in the SERP. Then along came the Panda algorithm update, which was quite effective at detecting duplicate content. Websites employing this method were severely penalized.
Attackers make use of this to their advantage. They duplicate a website’s content and publish it on multiple other websites. Google may index these pages with duplicate content before any other search engine. This will de-index the original page and have a negative effect on their rankings.
How To Overcome This Situation
Many competitors employ this scouring strategy. There are numerous tools available for identifying pirated content on the web. Copyscape is one example. It aids in locating copies of a particular page that rivals have deleted. Using a tool such as Quetext is another method for identifying duplicate content. This indicates which pages contain similar content to the original page.
If you discover scraped pages on your website, you should contact the administrator of the scraped pages to have the content removed. If that does not work, you can contact Google and alert them to the duplicate content. This copyright infringement form can be filled out.
Pogo Sticking
Pogo sticking is when users click on a page in the SERP, don’t discover what they’re looking for, and then leave the page. This typically occurs when a user searches for a term on Google and discovers a page that does not answer his question. Google monitors this pogo-sticking activity. This indicates to Google that the website is not an appropriate SERP result. This results in the website’s ranking falling.
Attackers utilize specialized bots that crawl the search engine in search of keywords that boost your website’s ranking. After clicking on your website, these bots rapidly leave the page. This provides an example of pogo-sticking. This negatively influences your website’s ranking and online traffic.
How To Overcome This Situation
Keep a close eye on the ranking of your website’s most essential pages. In Google Analytics, look for key metrics for these pages.
Navigate to Google Analytics > Content > Landing Pages. Follow the “Bounce Rate.” Examine the “bounce rate” of your web page(s) to determine if it exhibits any unusual behavior. This will allow you to determine if your website has been compromised by this negative SEO technique.
Unfavorable on-page SEO
This occurs when an adversary modifies on-page elements of your website, which can have severe consequences. This ultimately results in a decline in rankings and traffic.
Making Modifications To Content Or Code
This necessitates a high level of expertise in hacking. However, if you are a spiteful competitor, competitors can go to extreme lengths. The perpetrator looks for security flaws in the backend of your website so they can exploit them. Therefore, choosing an SSL or HTTPS certificate is even more crucial.
If your website’s security is compromised, an assailant could gain access to your website’s source code and content. Then, they can modify the code so that you see a different version of the page while your visitors see an entirely different page. This is harmful to your site’s ranking.
How To Overcome This Situation
Always ensure that your website’s backend software and all classes and elements used to construct it are current. In addition, it is essential to construct a script that backs up your web pages. If your website is compromised, it will be simpler to revert to a previous backup.
Regularly perform SEO site examinations and update your security certificates. Acquire a genuine HTTPS SSL certificate. This will secure your website from hackers and increase its ranking (since HTTPS is a ranking factor).
Deliberate Ddos Attacks
A DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack is a strategy in which the attacker sends a significant volume of traffic to your website. This causes the server to malfunction and renders your website inaccessible. Users will have a terrible time navigating your website.
Attackers make use of these DDoS attacks to significantly increase server burden. This hinders the user interface experience. Many may be unable to even access your website. Moreover, the Google arachnid will be incapable of crawling your web pages. This impacts your crawl budget and prevents Google from crawling and indexing your pages.
How to overcome this situation
Regularly monitor the performance of your site. Keep a close watch on the Google Page Speed Insights metrics, such as FCP (First Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay), and Speed Index, for your website’s most vital pages. If you observe that your web pages have slowed down without any changes to the code, check your server logs immediately. The log files will help you pinpoint the exact cause of the server’s increased burden. You can block these crawlers in the robots.txt file once you’ve identified their source.
Remove your website completely from Google
It sounds absurd, doesn’t it? However, this can occur on your website. A former employee of your company who now works for a competitor could do this. If a former employee still has access to the company’s accounts, such incidents may occur.
Ex-employees (who now work for your competitors) may alter your search console and utterly remove your website from Google’s index. Additionally, he can prevent all spiders, including the Google Bot, from crawling your pages.
How To Overcome This Situation
Delete all former employees’ accounts prior to their departure. Additionally, remove all permissions and access. This ensures that the employee has no control over your property.
If you discover that there has been tampering, quickly navigate to your search console and select the “Removals” tab.
Determine whether new requests have been submitted. Clicking “Cancel” immediately will eliminate all requests. Additionally, examine your robots.txt file to see if any crawling bots have been denied access.
Conclusion
There are a variety of SEO techniques used to improve websites. Where there is virtue, there is also evil. In the SEO industry, negative SEO practices are disgraceful, but they do exist. This emphasizes the significance of performing routine website assessments.
Adhere to a comprehensive SEO audit protocol to evaluate all of your on-page and off-page SEO factors. This will ensure that you are aware of any negative SEO attacks launched against your competitors.
If you discover these attacks extremely late and Google has already imposed a manual penalty, we recommend contacting an SEO firm that offers Google penalty recovery services. This will assist you in regaining website rankings and search engine traffic.
