Negative SEO is real. It is possible to damage, if not destroy, a site through the use of malicious backlinks and aggressive backlink spamming. Negative SEO is a legitimate danger that can result in lost organic search visibility and revenue. But it is possible to defend against negative SEO.

Every website owner aims to get a lot of traffic through search engine optimization. This is the goal. However, there are those who are willing to go around the rules or bend them altogether by resorting to bad SEO strategies. Unfortunately, this affects your SEO rank. You need every possible tool in order to protect your site against negative SEO.

• What is Negative SEO?
• What are the Types of Negative SEO?
• How do I know if my SEO is Negative?
• How SEO Affects your Business?

What is Negative SEO?

Negative SEO is also referred to as Black Hat SEO.  It involves highly unethical techniques that can adversely affect your page rank.  Imagine investing a lot of time, money, and effort on getting your website to page one of Google results, only to have your competitor succeed in lowering your rank through Black Hat SEO.  What can you do to prevent this and protect your website?

Read Also: The Best SEO Tips And Advice For 2021

Unfortunately, this happens.  Competitors could focus on dragging your page rank instead of focusing on getting their ranks up. It’s a quick way to get ahead of the competition without investing a lot of time on link building.  Of course, there are other reasons why your competitor could employ negative SEO.  They could also do it to get revenge.  They could get some sort of enjoyment from it.

Negative SEO can be done in different ways.  They can copy your content, and spread it all over the Internet.  They can acquire illegal access on other sites and erase alternative content.  They can link unrelated content to your website as well.  They do all this to score a penalty on the competitor’s website and their rank.  Ultimately, all these black hat strategies erase the site from the search index.

What are the Types of Negative SEO?

Creating a Private Blog Network

Link building can be challenging, but it’s not the case if you have several blogs linking to each other.  Those looking to use this technique will look for expired domains of good quality.  Usually, the previous owners of these websites may have worked hard on these sites’ SEO, getting legitimate backlinks from high-ranking websites.

Blogs are created using the expired domains.  They can rank a higher rank without needing to do link building themselves.  They can create content that people will want to link to.  They can create relationships with bloggers as well.

Fake Social Media Profiles

The presence of social media can have a considerable impact on your SEO ranking. That’s what your competitors are hoping.  They could create a fake account for you just to hurt your image by sending out spams and sending out malicious links.  They can use the accounts to share hoaxes or fake content.  This will cause your customers to lose their trust in your brand.

Spamming Negative Review

Similar to creating fake social media profiles, this strategy is used to hurt a brand’s image.  Remember that brands flourish with positive reviews. That’s the core of any business.  Positive reviews attract your target market and encourage them to engage with your business or brand.

You can imagine the damage that could be caused by fake accounts to your brand.  Search engines can actually detect when a website is in a bad spot or when people are unsatisfied with the brand.  Google can penalise your website by lowering your rank.

Building Bad Links to Your Website

Back then, getting as many backlinks as you can was a great way to improve and increase your SEO rank.  Nowadays, that’s hard to do.  In fact, it is no longer that simple.  There are stuff about link building that can actually affect your website’s rank.  These are the weaknesses in link building that can be used by your competitor to chip away at your rank.

How do I know if my SEO is Negative?

Have you ever experienced a rankings decline and suspected it was due to something a competitor was doing? We are going to focus on the process of diagnosing whether or not you’ve been hit by negative search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

In order to properly analyze these buckets, we’re going to need to be able to rely on a variety of tools.

Let’s step through the different tools and scenarios to determine if you were hit by negative SEO or if it’s just a mistake.

How are Google and Bing treating my site?

One of the simplest and easiest first steps to take is to check how Google and Bing are treating your site.

You should use both engines in every audit because they react differently, which helps you quickly diagnose a problem. What are we looking for?

• Site:domain.tld. Replace “domain.tld” with your actual domain. Both engines will return a list of pages from your domain, in rough order of importance.
• Are pages missing that you would expect to see due to their value? Look at the source code and robots.txt handling of those pages to determine whether they are accidentally being blocked by a misconfiguration.
• Are pages being demoted? If the index page is suddenly not in the top spot, something is probably wrong. Running this simple check recently, we noticed our preferred URL handling was causing our index page’s canonical to update to a page that 301 redirects back in a loop. Google had demoted this page on the site: query, but Bing didn’t. The problem was solved just by running that simple check and looking into the problematic page.
• Are there pages you don’t recognize? Do those pages look like something as simple as a misconfigured setting in your content management system (CMS) that allows strange indexation, or are these pages off-theme and spammy? The former is likely a mistake; the latter is probably an attack.
• Perform some branded queries. Search for domain.ltd, domain and other popular or normal phrases associated with your brand. Are you suddenly not ranking for them as you previously were? If not, were you overtaken by any suspicious results?

Raw weblogs

Having access to your raw weblogs is vital, but unfortunately, it is going to be made significantly more difficult with broader adoption of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

It is vital that you can access internet protocols (IPs) recorded in each of the pages visited on your site, including those you may not have the Google Analytics tracking code on. By parsing your logs, you can:

• Find IPs. This determines if the same group of IPs has been probing your site for a configuration weakness.
• Identify scrapers. Know if scrapers have been attempting to pull down content en masse.
• Identify response issues. If you’re having a number of server response issues where you wouldn’t expect to see them, you will now.

Many issues can be solved if you have access and the inclination to parse your logs for patterns. It’s time-consuming but worth doing.

Google Analytics

This could be its own series, as there are a multitude of areas to focus on within any sophisticated analytics package. However, let’s focus on some of the more obvious pieces:

• Bounce rate. Has it been trending up or down? How does this correspond with what you’re seeing in your raw logs. Is Google filtering out some of the bouncing traffic? Is the bounce rate showing any outliers when segmenting by channel (source), by browser or by geographic location?
• Session duration. Similar to bounce rate, for user signal purposes, are the sessions becoming abbreviated? Especially if also accompanied by an increase in overall sessions?
• All traffic channels and all traffic referrals. Are any sources now sending significantly more or less traffic when compared to periods in which your rankings were better? Are there unusual sources of traffic coming in that seem fake? Both are issues to research when you suspect negative SEO.
• Search console and landing pages. Similar to the Search Analytics check on Google Search Console itself, are there aberrations in which pages are now getting traffic, or are you seeing a large change in bounce and session duration on the pages you care about?
• Site speed. All things being equal, a faster site is a better site. Has the load time been increasing? Is it specifically increasing on Chrome? For specific pages? Are those pages that appeared benign ones that you didn’t previously recognize?

Google Search Console

What should you be looking for in Google Search Console (GSC) to help you determine if you’ve been a victim of negative SEO?

• Messages. If there is a massive change that Google wants to inform you about, such as a manual action due to incoming or external links, crawl problems or accessibility issues, messages in your GSC are the first place to look. If Google thinks you’ve been hacked, it will let you know.
• Search analytics. Looking at your queries over time, you can sometimes spot an issue. For instance, if query volumes associated with your branded and important phrases spike, did you see an uptick in clicks to your pages? If not, this could be an attempt to impact one user signal. Are your less important pages being sourced on the queries you care about? This could instead point to an issue with your content and content architecture.
• Links to your site. The obvious thing to look for is a large influx of low-quality, spammy links. But are they bad links?  If I cherry-pick some of the worst links and see that they are blocking AhrefsBot, this tells me they are probably spammy links which need to go.
• Internal links. What pages are you linking to heavily that you didn’t realize you were linking to? It could be a navigational issue, or it could be a situation where you’re linking to a spammy doorway page injected into your CMS.
• Manual actions. It should also exist in messages, but if you have a manual action, you need to address it immediately. It doesn’t matter what the reasons are; even if there was a legitimate attack on your site, you must fix it right away.
• Crawl errors. Rule out a ranking drop due to malicious intent by checking on the stability of your setup. If your server is throwing too many 500 responses, Google will crawl it less. If this occurs, chances are users are going to encounter more issues with your web pages, and it will slip in the rankings as RankBrain folds in the user data. If you pair this with raw weblog data, you might see if the server instability is due to an attack.

Bing Webmaster Tools

How can you determine what’s going on with your Bing rankings? Head to their webmaster tools and check for the following:

• Site activity. Similar to Search Analytics data from Google, Bing Webmaster Tools allow you to quickly assess whether your site is showing more or less frequently in search as a whole, whether click volume has changed, if there’s been a change on crawling and crawl errors, and, of course, pages indexed. You can give each section a deeper look.
• Inbound links. Just as with Google Search Console, you can see how these links look. Are they unexpected at all? Can they be found in different link analysis tools?

Link analysis tool

Using  your favorite link analysis tool, look at these points to determine if you’ve been hit with negative SEO:

• Organic keywords. Do you see a general trend in rankings? This should roughly match with the search analytics data from Google, but not always. Chances are you already know by this point that something is awry, but looking at the same data through a different visualization can determine if there is a problem.
• New backlinks and new domains and referring IPs. If you’re experiencing an attack, this is where you most likely will find it, if you see a large increase in links that you did not commission and do not want. Look at both of these reports, because having 2,000 pages on the same domain link to you is viewed differently from 2,000 new domains linking to you. In some cases, you may also find a large number of domains linking from the same IP. It’s a lazy negative SEO tactic, but it’s one of the more common ones.
• Lost backlinks and lost domains. Another vector of negative SEO is getting a competitor’s links removed. Are you losing links you previously worked hard to secure? You might need to reach out to those webmasters to find out why. Are pages linking to you suddenly inaccessible and now linking to a competitor? Or not linking to you at all?  You need to find out why.
• Broken backlinks. Sometimes a linking issue is your own. If you recently moved a site, made an architecture change or even updated a plug-in, you might have inadvertently caused a page to go offline, which results in lost link equity. Fixing this is as simple as bringing back the lost pages or redirecting the pages to a relevant page to capture a large percentage of the initial link equity.
• Anchors. Not enough time is focused here, even though over-optimization penalties and filters still exist. Did the change in links change your anchor text distribution, putting your commercial phrases in an unhealthy range? Are the overall phrases still looking OK, but the singular terms appear to be more targeted than previously? Are you getting a lot of incoming phrases that you would rather not be associated with?
• Outgoing linked domains and outgoing broken links. It is healthy to look to see if you are now perceived to be linking to areas where you did not wish to be linking and to check to ensure that those you wanted to be linking to still resolve as valid URLs. Injections to a CMS, indexed comments and other user-generated content (UGC)-type areas should be looked at.

Crawling and technical tools

Similar to the section on link analysis, if you have a favorite crawling and technical SEO tool, use that in your approach to determine if you’ve been hit by negative SEO.

• Site speed. How does the crawl site speed compare to what is found in Google Analytics or on individually run Google site speed tests? Are you being hampered by a large resource attempting to slow you down?
• Indexation status by depth. This is where manipulating your CMS setup and web architecture can really hurt if you’re suddenly duplicating or indexing a large percentage of pages, to the detriment of pages you do want to have indexed.
• Redirects. Namely, are you susceptible to open redirects which are leaching off of your available link equity?
• Crawl mapping. Conceptually this can be very useful when attempting to determine if there are active pages you really don’t want and how internal link distribution may be affecting them. Are they all orphaned pages (i.e., they exist but are not internally linked to), or are they embedded into the site’s navigation?
• On-page technical factors. This is the most important part, as it pertains to determining whether the situation is a negative SEO attack or an internal mistake. Crawling tools can help you quickly find which pages are set to nofollow or noindex or are conflicted due to canonicalization problems.

Plagiarism tool

How unique is your content? There are other plagiarism checkers, but Copyscape is the most popular, and it is thorough.

• Check your entire site. The simplest way to check is to have a plagiarism service crawl your site and then attempt to find significant string matches on other web pages found in the Google and Bing index. If you’re the target of fake Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requests or parasitic scrapers that are attempting to both copy you and outrank you on more authoritative domains, this will help you find such issues.
• Internal duplication. While most might assume that a competitor is attempting to scrape and replace them, the greater issue is internally duplicated content across a blog, across categorical and tag setups, and improper URL handling.

Using a number of tools to determine if you’ve been hit by negative SEO is a good idea. They will help you find issues quickly and in detail. Knowing if you’ve been hit, and how, is crucial to help you respond and clean up the mess so you can move forward.

How SEO Affects your Business?

Many brands and businesses know (or think they know) that they need SEO for their digital properties, and the benefits they will get from that SEO work being implemented on their behalf.

SEO will certainly improve a website’s overall searchability and visibility, but what other real value does it offer? Why is SEO so important?

These 10 reasons should offer some clarity, regardless of the industry or business size, as to why businesses need SEO to take their brand to the next level.

1. Organic Search Is Most Often the Primary Source of Website Traffic

Organic search is a huge part of most businesses ’ website performance, as well as a critical component of the buyer funnel and ultimately getting users to complete a conversion or engagement.

As marketers know, Google owns a significantly larger portion of the search market than competitors like Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, and the many, many others.

That’s not to say that all search engines don’t contribute to a brand’s visibility — they do — it’s just that Google owns about 75 percent of the overall search market. It’s the clear-cut leader and thus its guidelines are important to follow.

But the remaining 25 percent of the market owned by other engines is obviously valuable to brands, too.

Google, being the most visited website in the world (as well as specifically in the United States), also happens to be the most popular email provider in the world (with more than 1 billion users). Not to mention YouTube is the second biggest search engine.

We know that a clear majority of the world that has access to the internet is visiting Google at least once a day to get information.

Being highly visible as a trusted resource by Google and other search engines is always going to work in a brand’s favor. Quality SEO and a high-quality website takes brands there.

2. SEO Builds Trust & Credibility

The goal of any experienced SEO is to establish a strong foundation for a beautiful website with a clean, effective user experience that is easily discoverable in search with thanks to the trust and credibility of the brand and its digital properties.

Many elements go into establishing authority regarding search engines like Google. In addition to the factors mentioned above, authority is accrued over time as a result of elements like:

• Quality backlink profiles.
• Positive user behavior.
• Machine-learning signals.
• Optimized on-page elements and content.

But establishing that authority will do more for a brand than most, if not all, other digital optimizations. Problem is, it’s impossible to build trust and credibility overnight — just like real life. Authority is earned and built over time.

Establishing a brand as an authority takes patience, effort, and commitment, but also relies on offering a valuable, quality product or service that allows customers to trust a brand.

3. Good SEO Also Means a Better User Experience

Everyone wants better organic rankings and maximum visibility. Few realize that optimal user experience is a big part of getting there.

Google has learned how to interpret a favorable or unfavorable user experience, and a positive user experience has become a pivotal element to a website’s success.

Customers know what they want. If they can’t find it, there’s going to be a problem. And performance will suffer.

A clear example of building a strong user experience is how Google has become more and more of an answer engine offering the sought-after data directly on the SERPs (search engine results pages) for users.

The intention of that is offering users the information they are looking for in fewer clicks, quickly and easily. Quality SEO incorporates a positive user experience, leveraging it to work in a brand’s favor.

4. Local SEO Means Increased Engagement, Traffic & Conversions

With the rise and growing domination of mobile traffic, local search has become a fundamental part of small- and medium-sized businesses’ success.

Local SEO aims at optimizing your digital properties for a specific vicinity, so people can find you quickly and easily, putting them one step closer to a transaction.

Local optimizations focus on specific towns, cities, regions, and even states, to establish a viable medium for a brand’s messaging on a local level.

SEO pros do this by optimizing the brand’s website and its content, including local citations and backlinks, as well as local listings relevant to the location and business sector a brand belongs to.

To promote engagement on the local level, SEO pros should optimize a brand’s Knowledge Graph panel, its Google My Business listing, and its social media profiles as a start.

There should also be a strong emphasis on user reviews on Google, as well as other reviews sites like Yelp, Home Advisor, and Angie’s List (among others), depending on the industry.

5. SEO Impacts the Buying Cycle

Customers do their research. That’s one of the biggest advantages of the internet from a buyer perspective.

Using SEO tactics to relay your messaging for good deals, groundbreaking products and/or services, and the importance and dependability of what you offer customers will be a game-changer. It will also undoubtedly impact the buying cycle in a positive way when done right.

Brands must be visible in the places people need them for a worthy connection to be made. Local SEO enhances that visibility and lets potential customers find the answers, and the businesses providing those answer.

6. SEO Best Practices Are Always Being Updated

It’s great to have SEO tactics implemented on a brand’s website and across its digital properties, but if it’s a short-term engagement (budget constraints, etc.) and the site isn’t re-evaluated consistently over time, it will reach a threshold where it can no longer improve because of other hinderances.

The way the search world evolves, basically at the discretion of Google, requires constant monitoring for changes to stay ahead of the competition and, hopefully, on Page 1. Being proactive and monitoring for major algorithm changes is always going to benefit the brands doing so.

We know Google makes thousands of algorithm changes a year. Fall too far behind, and it will be extremely difficult to come back. SEO pros help to ensure that is avoided.

7. Understanding SEO Helps You Understand the Environment of the Web

With the always-changing environment that is the World Wide Web, it can be a challenge to stay on top of the changes as they take place. But staying on top of SEO includes being in the loop for the major changes taking place for search.

Knowing the environment of the Web, including tactics being used by other local, comparable businesses and competitors, will always be beneficial for those brands.

8. SEO Is Relatively Cheap

Sure, it costs money. All the best things do, right? But SEO is relatively cheap in the grand scheme of things, and the payoff will most likely be considered in terms of a brand’s benefit and bottom line.

This isn’t a marketing cost; this is a true business investment. Good SEO implementation will hold water for years to come. And, like most things in life, will only be better with more attention (and investment) it gets.

9. It’s A Long-Term Strategy

SEO can (and hopefully does) have a noticeable impact within the first year of action being taken, and many of those actions will have an impact that lasts more than several years.

As the market evolves, yes, it’s best to follow the trends and changes closely. But even a site that hasn’t had a boatload of intense SEO recommendations implemented will improve from basic SEO best practices being employed on an honest website with a decent user experience.

And the more SEO time, effort, and budget that is committed to it, the better and longer a website stands to being a worthy contender in its market.

10. It’s Quantifiable

While SEO doesn’t offer the easier-to-calculate ROI like that of paid search, you can measure almost anything with proper tracking and analytics.

Read Also: SEO Services As A Way To Earn Extra Income

The big problem is trying to connect the dots on the back end since there is no definitive way to understand the correlation between all actions taken.

Still, it is worth understanding how certain actions are supposed to affect performance and growth, and hopefully, they do. Any good SEO is going to be aiming at those improvements, so connecting the dots should not be a challenge.

Brands also want to know and understand where they were, where they are, and where they’re going in terms of digital performance, especially for SEO when they have a person/company that is being paid to execute on its behalf.

There’s no better way to show the success of SEO, either. We all know the data never lies.

Implementing strong, quality SEO on a brand’s website and digital properties is always going to be beneficial to that brand and its marketing efforts.

It’s considered a “new age” marketing technique, but it’s critical to a brand’s web presence in this day and age, especially as available data and rivaling competition continue to increase and grow.

Summary

Negative SEO is a horrible business practice, but some people still use it to try to undercut the competition. Instead of feeling fear, be confident that your website and your SEO tactics are best practices.

That’s truly the best way to combat any shady, Negative SEO. If you’re truly concerned about your business’s success, give your website’s SEO the attention and investment it deserves.