Should You Really Worry About Negative SEO?
Competitors use Negative SEO to reduce the ranking of a website in search engines.
Your competitors can do negative SEO on your website to harm your ranking. Therefore it is very important to prevent negative SEO to maintain ranking in Google SERP.
This article will help you understand what is negative SEO and how to protect your website from negative SEO.
What is Negative SEO
Negative SEO is a high risk, low reward activity.
Negative SEO black hat SEO techniques refers to the. Your competitors can use this to damage website ranking in search engines.
Nowadays link farms, private blog networks, thousands of bot scraping sites and the links that create them all belong to Negative SEO.
Unfortunately, your competitors or spammers can use these techniques to lower your site’s ranking.
What types of activities come under Negative SEO
Negative SEO activities can be done on the website in many ways. Here’s the most common:
- Creating spammy backlinks on your website.
- Copying and redistributing your content.
- Using link farms (creating thousands of backlinks using the tool) and private blog networks.
- your website by spammers high quality backlinks try to remove.
- Reducing your reputation by creating fake social profiles.
- Pointing your website link with unrelated keywords.
- hacking your website (wrong to de-index your site Robots.txt file can be added).
How to Protect Your Website Against Negative SEO
1. Set up Google Search Console
Google always keeps you updated about the website and gives quick information if there is any problem with your website.
Google sends you email alerts if:
- Your pages are not indexed.
- Malware attack is being done on your website.
- You got a manual penalty from Google.
- and many more…
But first, you need to add your site to Google Search Console. With the Google Search Console tool, you can get valuable insights like Crawl errors, Ranking Keyword, impressions and much more.
First, you need to create an account. After that, ‘Add PropertyClick ‘.
Next, enter your domain name and Continue Click on the button.
Now, you have to verify your website that you are the owner of it. It will give you 5 ways to verify ownership. But here I will verify with HTML tag.
Simply copy the code and paste it in theof your site.
Now if there is any kind of issue in your site, it will alert you.
2. Keep an eye on your Backlinks Profile
This is the most important process to avoid Negative SEO. Spammers or your competitors can create low-quality links to your website.
But the question is how to check backlinks.
Well, there are many free and premium tools which allow to check backlink profile.
Ahrefs This is a very popular tool that allows you to track your backlinks and keywords.
SEMrush – Audits your backlink profile. And helps you find the best keywords and monitor your competitors.
Serpstat – Comes with a powerful tool set: Backlinks Analysis, Rank Tracking, Keyword Research, Competitor Analysis and Site Audit
Moz’s Link Explorer – Gives a good report of your link profile.
openlinkprofiler – Just enter your domain, it will analyze the link.
LinkResearchTools – This tool identifies toxic links from your backlink profile and allows disavow links and manage your disavow file.
Monitor Backlinks Checks the good and bad backlinks of any website.
Using Google Search Console Tools Click on Link >> Top linking sites >> More. Here you will see sites that are linked to your site and giving you backlinks.
You can use any of these tools from time to time. After receiving low-quality / spammy backlinks, remove them.
3. Protect Your Best Backlinks
There are many website competitors who try to remove the best backlinks from your website.
Usually, they contact the website owner of the link using your name and request to remove your backlink.
To avoid this, you can: When you communicate with webmasters, always use an email address from your domain, rather than using Gmail or Yahoo. Your email should look like this: [email protected]
4. Check Duplicate Content
It is very easy for anyone to copy the content and it can be published on any other website in few minutes.
There are many spammers who copy the content and distribute it all over the internet.
So, if most of your content gets duplicated, there are chances that your website could be penalized and ranking could be low.
To check if your website has duplicate pages on the Internet, you can Copyscape.com You can use . Copyscape One plagiarism checker tool Which finds out who has copied your content.
5. Check Your Website Speed
Speed is an important Google Ranking Factor Is. Faster loading and better ranking of visitors user experience gives.
if your website loading speed If it suddenly slows down, it could happen that someone is sending thousands of requests per second to your server. They do this to bring down your server.
GTmetrix And Pingdom Using the tool, you can set alerts for your website loading speed. Here are some more tools you can use – Website Speed Test Karne Ke Liye Top 17 Best Tools
6. Secure Your Website
Google gives more priority to security. There are many spammers who install suspicious code in the site and send your traffic on the website to malicious URLs or steal user data. This has the effect of negative SEO on your website.
In addition, they can hack your website and add the wrong Robots.txt files to de-index your site.
If you are using WordPress then there are some articles that can help you:
7. Report Fake Accounts Created on Social Media
If someone creates an account on a social media site using your website name, report it immediately. Because they can damage your brand reputation.
To find out who is using your brand name, you can Mention tool can be used.
8. Do not become a victim of negative SEO because of your own strategies
Keyword Stuffing – Filling keywords forcibly in the content is called keyword stuffing. This creates a bad experience for the user.
In the olden days, this technique was very effective and used to get a high rank in the search results. But now, your keyword stuffing Website SEO has a negative effect on.
Create rich content and use keywords in the right place. Keep keyword density 1.5% – 2% in your content. Also, use the related keyword.
Paid Links – Do not buy links. The search engine (Google) does not like sites that buy and sell links. It breaks Google’s guidelines. You can google it to know in detail Webmaster Guidelines can read.
Article Spinning Re-writing of an article is called “Article Spinning”. Negative Effects of Article Spinning:
- It creates low-quality and sometimes unreadable content.
- Creates a bad experience on the reader.
- make you unprofessional.
Invisible Text & Link – Invisible texts means in the content or website white text To write. These texts are not visible to the visitor, but search engine crawlers can easily see and index them.
It is most commonly used by hackers to hide links.
Spam Comment – If someone comments spam on your site, remove them. If you are a WordPress user Akismet Anti-Spam It is the best plugin that automatically filters spam comments.
Link Exchange – It works for a short time! But there are risks too. If you add bad links and unrelated links, then it is a sign of negative SEO.
Paid Traffic – This traffic to your site bounce rate increase. People just come and exit your homepage. Higher bounce rate is not good for the website.
Bonus Point: Website Ko Negative SEO Se Protect Kaise Kare
What you can do if you notice that someone has started negative SEO activities (low-quality links) against your website:
List of Bad Backlinks
Here I will use three tools to find low backlinks:
- SEMrush
- Google Search Console Tool
- Moz Explorer
Using SEMrush
- SEMrush Backlink Audit go to page
- Add the URL of your site.
- Next, click on “Audit”.
- It will show Toxic backlinks with score (60-100 – Toxic, 45-59 – Potentially Toxic). Select the Toxic backlinks from the list that you want to remove.
anymore Delete >> To Disavow Click on
Now Disavow go to tab and Export to TXT Click on
Your disavow file will start downloading.
Using the Google Search Console Tool
This is a manual process and will take you a lot of time.
Link >> Top linking sites >> More Click on Here you will see sites that are linked to your site and giving you backlinks.
Click on the Download button to download this list.
Now you have to check it yourself whether it contains any spam link or not. If you find spam, unrelated or unnatural links on this list, write them down in your notepad.
Using Moz Explorer
Moz Link Explorer Visit the site and sign up.
- Enter the URL of the site and click on the search icon.
- now on the left side Spam Score Click on
Now you will be able to see the list of Spam backlinks. If you have a free account it will only show you a few links. You will need to upgrade to see all links.
Now, to download the report Export CSV Click on
Now we have a list of bad backlinks, so let’s start removing them…
Now remove bad links from website
Google Disavow tool Go to the page and select your domain from the drop-down, then Disavow Links Click on
again in the next page Disavow Links Click on
here only Upload the text file of your spam link And submit Click on the button.
Now you will see a message. hence,
After uploading the file, you have to wait 1-2 weeks to see its effect. Google will crawl those pages again.
conclusion
It is very important to stop negative SEO for the growth of the website. Here is a summary you can use to prevent negative SEO:
- Set up Google Search Console
- Keep an eye on your Backlinks Profile
- Protect Your Best Backlinks
- Check Duplicate Content
- Check Your Website Speed
- Secure your website
- Report Fake Accounts Created on Social Media
- Do not become a victim of negative SEO because of your own strategies
What other methods are you using to prevent negative SEO against the website? Have you experienced such attacks? Tell your opinion in the comment box!
Hope you found this post useful and comprehensive!
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