How to Protect Your Website from Negative SEO

Here, I will provide you some effective ways to which you can prevent your site from the black hat or negative SEO attack.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website on the organic search engine result pages (SERPs), by combining search engine friendly elements into a website. Although, as policies changing day by day, SEO also have experienced a major transformation.

According to policies, you always need to be aware of it. Earlier, using Old SEO, you could bring your blog at first position in search engine. But now, by following old SEO, you are more likely to create black tricks/black hat SEO i.e., negative SEO.

READ ON: How To Get Indexed Easily In Search Engine

Negative SEO? 😮 What is that?

Yeah! It is the type of SEO.

Basically, there are two main types of SEO. 1. White Hat SEO and 2. Black Hat SEO.

There are stark differences in the approach and long-term results of white hat and black hat search engine SEO optimization. Most of the bloggers who want better results are tend to stay away from black hat SEO.

Let’s understand the difference between them:

White Hat SEO:

White hat SEO uses techniques that improve the search engine positioning SEO of a website which doesn’t run afoul of search engine (mainly Google) guidelines. It mainly offers:

• Quality services
• Making your site easy to navigate

Implementing White Hat SEO practices is the best way to create a successful website. It also produces effective, long-lasting and ethical improvements to your website and is always good business practice.

Black Hat SEO:

Black Hat SEO/ Negative SEO refers to the practice of using a black hat and unethical techniques to sabotage a competitor’s rankings in search engines. Implementing black hat SEO can possibly block your Web site on a search engine.

It can take place in various types:

• Building hundreds or thousands of spammy links to your website.
• Copying your content and distributing it all over the internet.
• Hacking your website.
• Creating fake social profiles and ruining your reputation online.

No doubts, Negative SEO does a really bad impression to your website. Even many websites had the issue.

It better to avoid black hat SEO. Preventing it is much easier than fixing it.

Although, Google continuously works on their algorithm with the aim of trying to identify such problems in and catch them ahead of time.

Surely, you want to simply protect your site from such attack. So, you might be thinking, What to do now?

Right?

So, here in this guide, I will tell you, how you can prevent your site/blog from Black Hat SEO.

Here, I will guide you some effective ways to which you can prevent your site from such attacks.

Are you ready?

Yea!! Let’s move further.

Do Regular Link Audits:

Regular link audit means performing in-depth analysis that allows us to emphasize a certain aspect of link building. Just like SEO audit, it is one of the essential processes of the off site SEO process.

Link auditing helps webmaster in detecting problems or opportunities in terms of backlinks. It consists of following components:

• Backlink analysis
• Link relevancy
• Broken link building strategy
• Backlink competitor analysis

Regularly Check Your Site Speed:

Every webmaster is aware of Google policies. Google uses a multitude of factors to determine how to rank search engine results. Similarly, Google uses site speed as a ranking factor.

While running a website with fast speed, you found a sudden breakdown that causes slow loading, you should go for crawling tools to look for anything suspicious.

READ ON: Make Your WordPress Site Faster

This sometimes happens because of Forceful Crawling. Forceful Crawling puts a load on the web server and thus your site loads slow and might even crash. To fix this issue, immediately contact your hosting provider. You must check this list of best-managed WordPress hosting.

Search For Copy Content:

Content marketing is all about story telling. You might regularly publish fresh and quality content. Like site speed, it also has become an essential factor for site ranking in search engine.

As content is the king, some site owners copy another’s content to beef up their site. This is what known as content scraping. Content scraping is the process of copying content from your website and pastes to other websites.

It really has a serious impact on your site SEO. If the copied content gets indexed before your content then your page might be devalued, and your site might fall in rank as a result.

READ ON: Top most Important Ranking Factor

To find out copied content, use the online tool Copyscape. If you find such contents, claim the webmasters by filling Google’s Copyright Removal form.

Regularly Check Site CTR:

Click-through rate measures how successful an ad has been in capturing users’ interest. The higher the click-through rate, the more successful the ad has been in generating interest.

It is a good indicator of whether you’re attracting correct visitors. If you consistently creating such kind of contents, your CTR will be high. If you notice a sudden drop in CTR, something’s fishy.

Although this attack is difficult to find until you avoid monitoring your keywords’ CTR.

Log in to Google Search Console, click Search Traffic > Search Analytics, and look at your CTR across all keywords. If you find a large difference, contact Google and ask to disavow offending links.

Boost Your Security:

Website security is a very serious issue. No one can predict that will be attacked. Although it may because of loose security. Many potential security issues may arise if some basic security precautions aren’t taken.

Driving a successful site also invite hackers and spammers to take interest in breaking security.

Negative SEO attack may negatively affect your site’s search rankings. Sites with Google flag in the search engine may alert visitors to stay away.  So, make sure your security is up to date. You also can:

• Migrate your site to HTTPS
• Encrypt CMS software with powerful encryption

Read On: Guide to Tighten Your Site’s Security

Monitor Google My Business:

Negative SEO attackers may sometimes send a flood to your website with fake, negative reviews. Unless your site caught in a controversy, you less likely to have an overabundance of negative reviews.

So you need to take action as quickly as possible. With Google My Business, it is easy to report these malicious, fake, negative reviews.

• Find out your business listing.
• Click on Review summary.
• Click flag fake reviews and then fill out the report form.

Protect Your Best Backlinks:

Attackers most likely to remove your best back links. They do this by using your name to contact webmasters and ask to remove the link.

You can prevent this by using Monitor Backlinks. Check your list of backlinks and sort them according to page ranks. It is the best way to find out valuable backlinks.

Add tags to those links, so that you can verify if any one of those got removed.

Once you added tags, sort them by tags and see if their status changes. If any of these links are removed, contact the webmaster.

Conclusion:

Google becomes very smart now. It can catch problematic linking behavior and curtail it before it has an impact on your SERPs.

If your website becomes a victim of a negative SEO attack, don’t panic. Take action quickly and resolve the issue. Also regularly monitor your site SEO.