Tips On How To Protect Your Website From Negative SEO

Not All SEO Is Positive

We often discuss and emphasize the importance of an excellent SEO strategy for your website. A robust SEO campaign will aid your site in gaining more web visitors who will later convert to more customers, thus contributing to the growth of your business. An SEO strategy that entails consistent updates of relevant and high-quality content on your website and adequately distributing the content to promote your website is the best place to begin. All the same, a good SEO strategy should entail protection from harmful SEO attacks.

What's Negative SEO?

More often than not, negative SEO attacks are typically launched by hackers or competitors who want to tarnish your website's search rankings and render it useless. The attackers achieve this by applying some kind of reverse optimization on your website, which could involve flooding it with irrelevant content, spam links, or harmful software that affects its performance and, consequently, your online reputation.

Even the slightest negative SEO can prevent your site from reaching the highest possible search engine rankings, eventually costing you a lot of time and money to rebuild your website. To always keep your site protected, you must remain vigilant by having these tips in your SEO strategy:

1. Monitor Each Aspect Of Your Site Keenly

One of the best ways to avoid falling prey to negative SEO attacks is by always being on the lookout for anything abnormal happening on your site. Anomalies can be challenging to spot, mainly when you have many daily business operations. However, your site shall be monitored closely with assistance from professional internet marketing experts at Stigan Media. We will look out for a severe decrease in the speed of your website. When pinpointing and preventing negative SEO attacks, information such as search engine rankings and keywords' click-through rates is vital. Any sudden spikes in any of these statistics could indicate an imminent attack and will allow any harmful content or links to be identified and neutralized. Using Google Analytics, you should always watch for unusual traffic dips.

2. Be On the Lookout For External Negative Content

While most negative SEO attacks are mainly focused on your website's internal working, such as backlinks and keywords, other attacks can manifest themselves through a different website and have devastating effects on search rankings. If you are working to avert a damaging SEO attack, watch out for a rise in negative reviews targeting your business on sites like Yelp. While some odd bad reviews could show up occasionally, a spike in these reviews is apparently unusual and could be a sign of an attack. You can quickly identify and respond to such reviews before they cause harm to your website by constantly checking your Google My Business profile and reporting all false reviews for removal.

3. Scraping

Your website's content could also be used against you by black SEO attackers. This is often achieved by scraping, a method where your site's original content is stolen and posted on your competitor's site. Original content is an essential aspect of an SEO strategy. Using someone else's content without their knowledge is illegal, and you should always keep your business website unique from what your competitors have. When your content is stolen and posted elsewhere, your SEO rankings will drop drastically, and your keywords will no longer be valid. If you catch someone plagiarizing your site's content, you should report them using the Google copyright removal form, and they will have to face dire consequences.

The easiest way to check for duplicate content is by running your website through Copyscape, and you will be alerted of any duplicate content. With the premium subscription, you can perform a batch search, which means searching 10,000 pages of your website with just one click.

Copyscape will also be applicable when you outsource your content writing services because you can run the articles through the site to ensure nothing is plagiarized.

4. Constantly Monitor Link Profile Growth

Numerous tools, such as the Moz Open Site Explorer, track all your backlinks and can provide progress graphs for the links in your profile and their referring domains. If you witness a weird spike in any of them, you should immediately look into the recently acquired links since you could be on the verge of a damaging SEO attack. Our company performs frequent link audits to ensure that no one tampers or alters your website's backlinks,, which link you to other sites and relevant content in your niche.

Seek The Services Of Search Engine Marketing Experts

It is often said that if you think hiring an expert will cost you a fortune, wait until you hire a novice.

While safeguarding your website from harmful SEO attacks can be daunting, web designers and SEO specialists can help keep your website safe and ranking well on search engines. If you want to learn more about how to prevent harmful SEO attacks and other valuable tips, you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook for constant updates. You could also contact us directly by telephone or online to schedule a free consultation session and learn how to improve, develop, or maintain your website.