Not All SEO Is Positive
We often talk about and emphasize the importance of having 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. Having 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 the 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, which will eventually cost you a lot of time and money to rebuild your website. To always keep your site protected, it is crucial that you remain vigilant by having these tips in your SEO strategy:
1. Monitor Each Aspect Of Your Site Keenly
One of the best ways through which you can avoid falling prey to negative SEO attacks is by always being on the lookout for anything abnormal happening on your site. Sometimes, anomalies can be difficult to spot mainly when you have lots of business operations to perform on a daily basis. However, with assistance from professional internet marketing experts at Stigan Media, your site shall be put under close monitoring. We will look out for a severe decrease in the speed of your website. And when it comes to pinpointing and preventing negative SEO attacks, information such as search engine rankings and keywords click-through rate 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. If you use Google Analytics, it is advisable to 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 negative SEO attack, be sure to watch out for a rise in negative reviews targeting your business on sites like Yelp. While some odd bad reviews could show up from time to time, a spike in these reviews is apparently unusual and could be the sign of an attack. You can easily 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 blackhat 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. It is illegal to use someone else's content without their knowledge, 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 useful. 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 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 come in handy when you outsource your content writing services because you can run the articles through the site to make sure nothing was plagiarized.
4. Constantly Monitor Link Profile Growth
There are numerous tools, such as the Moz Open Site Explorer, that track all your backlinks 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 negative SEO attack. Our company performs frequent link audits to make certain that no one tampers or alters any of 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 it will cost you a fortune to hire an expert, 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 are interested in learning more about how you can prevent harmful SEO attacks and other valuable tips, you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook for constant updates. You could also reach out to us directly through telephone or online to schedule a free consultation session and learn how you can improve, develop or maintain your website.
