Negative reviews are rampant in the business world and their impact is deadly as well. To locate negative reviews, keep an eye on your Google My Business Listings and reputation using tools. Find the reviews about your business and flag the fake reviews.When some one runs a negative SEO campaign, its impact on your search rankings seems contextual obvious. A sudden drop in rankings and partial or complete de-indexing of your site could be the aftermath of such attempts. Now, as Penguin is now granular and getting refreshed in real time, you can regain the lost ranking much faster than ever.
Protect your website against hacking and attacks. This is how you can reduce the chances of being compromised. Keep your website hacking proof to prevent any attempt to get your website injected with infected code. In addition, you must go for HTTP migration if you’re in ecommerce and store sensitive data.Upgrading your website, though, isn’t directly linked to negative SEO, it reduces the chances of brute force attacks. In long run , it saves your website from being compromised.
Trusted Web is a SEO and Web development outsourcing company headquartered in Ahmedabad, India.Trusted Web is founded by a group of Marketing & web development experts who have been working in IT outsourcing industry around 15 years in India. While working with multiple clients and hundreds of projects we have learnt a lot about customers’ needs, expectations and challenges. And we wanted to help them work more effectively by providing flexible yet high quality service which would leverage IT potential of India, assure skills and quality.
Google is quite good at detecting when negative SEO is occurring. For example, if someone’s trying to do some Google Bowling and smash you over with site-wide links, there’s a good chance that the link from that site will only be counted as one vote from them – unlikely to do you any real harm.Also, remember that while Google is actively hunting down Black Hat SEO practices, some might slip through for a while. This means that Negative SEO attempts won’t guarantee a penalty from Google for the victim. Not only that, it might even do the opposite and actuallyhelp the target to rank better!
Similarly, hacking attempts are not that hard to avoid as long as you are using a robust system securing your site (make sure they are updated). Also avoid using simple administrator passwords just because you think nobody is interested in ruining your humble site. You know what they say – better safe than sorry.In general, Negative SEO can be costly, takes a lot of effort and is highly risky. The return on the other hand, isn’t even guaranteed and while it might work, it’s quite easy to fix once the target realize what is happening.
In short – Negative SEO is a high risk, low reward activity. Unless there’s a very compelling reason (revenge maybe?), it is quite unlikely for anyone to attempt on doing it.The most likely websites to be targeted for SEO are those in highly-competitive, high-money fields – gambling sites are a common example of this. Sites that are in calmer niches are far less likely to be hit by negative SEO – indeed, anything that happens is more likely to be an accident or a remnant of an old advertising strategy instead of a deliberate attack on you.
That doesn’t mean you should be complacent, though. Constant vigilance is the best way to protect your site and your reputation, so let’s look at what you can do to help protect your site.The first step in defending your website is to detect any signs of attack such as a sudden drop in organic traffic. This is easy to notice if you are constantly monitoring your traffic through Google Analytics.You can also set up Google Webmaster Tools Email Alert. This will allow Google to notify you through email if your website is not indexed or receive a manual penalty.
If you haven’t done anything wrong, that can mean that your website is under attack. The sooner you know, the faster you can react and minimize the damage.Google’s answer to Negative SEO is the Disavow tool. You can see the full process here – what it comes down to, though, is basically saying “I don’t like or trust that link, please don’t factor it into my rankings”. By disavowing low quality links, you avoid associating your website with them so that your ranking and reputation is protected.
Utilizing the Disavow tool also tells Google that you care about the quality of links pointing to your site. This will be taken into consideration when Google’s Webspam Team is considering whether to penalize your site when they detect an influx of bad links pointing to it.Hackers generally require some sort of administrator access in order to mess around with your site, and by adding additional levels of security, you can drastically reduce the odds that they’ll be able to break in and start disrupting what you’re doing.
This isn’t tied to a particular problem, but you should regularly revise your SEO properties.This includes checking out your robot.txt once in a while or performing random checks on your contents’ internal coding (headers, image alt tag etc).If you are using SEOPressor, checking SEO properties will be much easier as each contents will have it’s SEOPressor score. If you regularly optimize your contents’ SEO properties to get high SEOPressor score, then you can easily spot the ones with bad score and fix them.
It is always better to be active and aggressive in searching for attacks on your site, rather than locking it up and expecting that nobody will be able to get in.Make no mistake – negative SEO attacks are a real threat, they’re just not a common one. And even though you can disavow links or report them to Google, it might take some time before Google can conclude that you are innocent and not the one who’s behind the Black Hat practices.
It’s better to be safe than sorry. Now that you know what is negative SEO, set aside some time every now and then to check for negative SEO, and if need be, resolve it using whichever technique is most appropriate. It is also a good idea to just be nice to others and avoid giving anyone any reason to attack you in the first place. After all, being nice is free.