How to Detect and Defend from Negative SEO Attacks

By: answerout

The SEO industry has changed a lot in the last couple of years. As an outcome, many digital marketers have adapted their tactics because of negative SEO attacks that have been commonly spotted in the industry. A negative SEO attack can ruin a website’s reputation, causing companies to lose their rankings. This begs the question, are there protective procedures? Yes, there are. This article will help you uncover how to detect and protect your company from a negative SEO attack. Don't ignore this if you want to build your online business and keep it secure.

Types of Negative SEO Attacks to Look Out For

There are several types of SEO attacks that can be directed against companies. Here are the recurrent ones to look out for;

Destructive Backlinks

Your SEO could still have a fighting chance if you have one or two harmful backlinks. This, however, could take a turn for the worse if you allowed the numbers to grow beyond that.

Attackers often use self-operating bots to bring about such massive destructive links. The majority of these links can be traced back to an anchor text unconnected to you or have keywords that make it seem like you’re controlling your ratings. These links should be detected and removed in time before you get penalized.

Scraped Content

This involves copying every part or all of your content onto other sites to reduce your ratings. When Google encounters matching content on various sites, it will only rate one of those versions. Generally, Google’s algorithm can differentiate the actual copy from fake ones. However, if it discovers the copied content in one too many locations, it can cause problems for your business.

Fake Negative Feedback

Too many negative reviews are a damaging SEO practice that can ruin one's digital business reputation. This has been an emerging SEO problem for many companies because it's easy for someone to create a fake account and leave a negative review.

While not all negative feedback is a damaging SEO attack, it's wise to be careful in tracking these reviews and dealing with them. While Google has put up policies and procedures to stop this, its algorithm isn't efficient enough to detect such breaches.

Fake Inbound Links

SEO attacks have evolved in such a way they've become dodgy, and in their effort to reduce your ratings, they may attack your inbound links profile in several ways. One of the most common entails filing fake inbound links requests. If competitors want to destroy your network’s rating, they can mimic your contact administrators requesting some of your inbound links.

A Hacked Webpage

An attacker who seeks to destroy your business might go as far as hacking your network. If they can do that, they can sabotage your SEO efforts whenever they can. A hacked website can potentially cause other significant problems such as search engine visibility loss, backlinks disaster, and reputation catastrophe.

How to Safeguard against Negative SEO

If somebody wanted to destroy your network's rating, they could make several SEO attacks. Therefore, defense is the best offense when reducing the harmful effects of these attacks. Take a look at some of the defensive tips you could use.

Conserve Your Backlink Profile

Backlinks are essential for any digital business; therefore, you can't disregard them. A strong backlink tactic and an updated backlinks portfolio are necessary to ensure that your network runs smoothly. Once you have them in place, it's important to regularly perform an audit by monitoring your network's authority score and investigating any trend changes.

Keep Watch on Scraped Data

Copied content can generate significant problems that Google might penalize. This harmful SEO attack can ruin your network’s searching rate, which is why you should be careful while handling it. Once you identify the copied content, call the website sponsor, fill in a Google form to report the issue, and report the attack via the complaint assistant.

Report Fake Negative Reviews

Reviews can significantly impact one's website's rating and local SEO. That's why negative and fake customer feedback can mess up your SEO ratings. If you're a more prominent retailer, you might not feel the pinch, but you most likely will if you're a medium or small company. The increased list of negative reviews can diminish the network's reputation with time, hence causing a reduction in traffic. Nonetheless, an attacker might require a lot of persistence to affect the entire operation, thus giving you a chance to identify the hostile SEO attack early enough.

Concerning the above, be careful as you oversee your reviews and inspect every case. Trying to communicate the problem to the administrators is beneficial, for it will both expose the fake reviews and better your customer feedback. Once you are sure that a review is simulated, you report it to the program that published it.

Keep off Fake Backlink Requests

This malicious SEO attack is more complex to identify than most, but not impossible. You can't be notified if someone sends a fake backlink request, but you can adjust notifications for lost backlinks with a backlink tool. The best thing you can do is keep your most valuable backlinks safe by contacting the domain administrators and not accepting any other backlink requests from emails other than yours.

Detect Security Violation

If your network is hacked, there are chances that the attacker won't destroy it entirely. Instead, they could stay low-key and perform evil actions that can't be noticed easily. These can ruin your SEO without your knowledge; therefore, to tackle such threats, put up security breach procedures in your Google Search Engine and perform network audits daily.

Conclusion

Competitors using questionable SEO tactics bring about issues that can lead to the destruction of a business. The best way to safeguard your site’s network is to be dynamic. This means practicing good SEO techniques and monitoring your backlinks and analytics account. Businesses can optimize their networks for search engines by following what we’ve mentioned in this article to the letter.

Are you familiar with other tips on how to secure your business from a negative SEO attack? Please share with us by commenting below.

Author Bio

Christine James believes that every customer has a voice. She is the Community Manager at HissingKitty.com (a customer complaints website) and loves talking to customers on social media about their challenges with Fortune 500 companies. Her work has been published on Huffington Post, Inc., SocialMediaToday, and Thought Catalog. Follow her on Twitter @hissingkittycom.