One of the latest challenges that search engine optimization experts’ face is how to recover from negative SEO? Negative SEO can result in losing traffic and links in your backlink profiles that you don’t recognize. Negative SEO is placing a large volume of obviously spammy links that point to your website. There are a lot of ways when your site can be a victim of negative SEO. Some of these are:
• Inject spam and malware on your website
Sometimes, hackers may find security vulnerabilities in your FTP login details and inject spam and malware onto the website. They may edit robots.txt files to block Google bot or to restrict all IPs from a certain range, or similar things.
• Spam reporting
When you’re doing some sorts of things that are on the grey or black hat borderline in terms of link acquisition, your competitors might spam report you. Your competitor may leave a threat at webmaster forums in Google Webmaster Tools. This might be your competitors or other webmasters or could be random people.
• Nasty links to your website
When someone builds bad links to your website, it can cause you terrific troubles.
• Fake reviews
Watch out on review sites for fake reviews. If there are bad reviews about your website, it could have an impact on the overall rankings of the page.
• Negative keywords
Negative words like “Site name scam”, where site name is the website name being targeted can hurt the site’s reputation.
How to overcome from negative SEO?
1) Google Disavow Tool
With Google Disavow Tool, you can ask Google to not to take low-quality links that you don’t control into account while assessing your website. It is a great tool to clean up unnatural links pointing to your site. This tool can remove any impact the back link has on the rankings of the page.
2) Backlink Audit
Webmasters also need to monitor their backlink profile and identify low quality links as they appear. Backlink audits are essential for online success. It’s simple to hold a backlink audit. Download your backlinks from Google Webmaster account, or from a backlink tool, and keep an eye on the links pointing to your website.
3) Get bad links removed
The way to get bad links removed is to contact the website owner and request to take down the links. Cumbersome process!
The good news is that there are a few tools that make this task easier such as Rmoov, Remove’em that allow you to identify spammy backlinks and contact website owners to track the removal status.
4) Official Complaint to Google
All search engines have policies against negative SEO and an official complaint with search engines, assist you with direct intervention.
5) Promote positive SEO
An effective way to fight negative SEO is to follow positive SEO strategies. Have a quality back link profile, and repeat customers will go a long way in showing Google that your site deserves that ranking. The better a site is with quality content; the less likely it will be a victim of negative SEO.
The Final Words
Negative SEO is a serious threat to many companies online. Lack of transparency and ignorance to perform backlink audits can kill your business overnight. Follow Google’s guidelines and encourage right SEO strategies to rank high in search engine results.
What do you do to protect your website from negative SEO? Share your thoughts with us in the comment section below!