What is Negative SEO?
A negative SEO, usually performed by a competitor website, is a practice of bringing another website down by reducing their SEO score.
How is this possible, you ask? There are plenty of ways that competitors can try to ruin your SEO ranks:
- They can add bad backlinks to your website by creating hundreds of malicious links
- They can make bad keywords like online poker or Viagra point to your website
- They can ruin your reputation by creating fake social media profiles
- They can even remove good backlinks from your website
- They can hack your website and reduce your SEO scored
Other websites can benefit by bringing down their competitor’s search rank. This is why many people have started following this illegal practice.
Here come the 7 powerful SEO tips to prevent your website from negative SEO & enhance your SEO better:
1. Check regularly on Google Search Console
Google Search console is a very useful tool by Google which provides you with all the data and reports on the search traffic of your website. All this information cannot be obtained from any other website.
Let us see what all can be done with the Search Console by Google:
- You can learn the most common keywords that people use to get to you. This can help you ascertain whether you are successful in attracting people to your website through the use of your keywords!
- You can find out the locations where people come to you. Through this information, you can easily find out whether your target audience is being reached or not!
- You can also find out whether your website is mobile responsive or not.
- You can find out the backlinks created by your SEO.
- You can also check your website for any security breaches or suspicious activities that you know nothing about.
2. Perform regular checks for backlinks
Backlinks are the most common way in which people perform negative SEO practice. They link irrelevant and malicious content back to your website which drastically affects your SEO rank.
You should perform a regular backlink analysis to prevent your website from bad backlinks.
If you detect some bad backlinks, immediately contact the respective website owners and request them to remove the backlink. If they refuse to do so, Google has a very useful too: The Disavows Links tool, which can be used to disavow bad backlinks.
3. Keep an eye out for content scrapers
Many a time, negative SEO practitioners scrape, or copy, content from your website and use it on their website, claiming that the content is their own.
This becomes a problem when Google too believes that they are the original content owners. When such a thing happens, it affects the rank of your website in a very negative way.
If you find that your content is plagiarized, fill the Google copyright removal form and report the website.
4. Regularly check your keyword CTR
Click-through-rate is the measure of how many people visited your website and it determines how many conversions you achieved.
It also keeps a check of the bounce rate of your website, that is, how many people left your website immediately after visiting it. A higher bounce rate is very bad for your SEO rank.
People use CTR to increase the bounce rate of their competitor’s website. The only way to keep a check of CTR is through the Google Search console tool.
If you detect a website affecting your bounce rate, go to the Google disavows tool and disavow their website.
5. Check your page loading speed
If your website starts loading slowly without any reason, there is something suspicious and you need to look into the matter.
It might be the cause of spam or forceful scrawling if there is no problem with the website design and server.
6. Increase website security
Increase the security of your website and prevent it from getting hacked. Here are a few ways of doing so:
- Security breaches usually happen on websites which have login pages or pages which allow monetary transactions. Therefore, to increase the security of such pages, it is best to get them encrypted.
- Every resource which is attached to your website, including the database, plugins, or other web pages can provide an opening for hackers! Therefore, you must remove all the resources which are no longer in use.
- Be regular with security scans on your website.
- If you are using an outdated software version for example scripts and platforms used in the website, they can provide a weak point for hackers to abuse! Therefore, make sure that you keep all the software used in your website up-to-date.
7. Keep an eye out for fake social media accounts
People could be spreading false rumours about your website and displaying your website in a negative light in front of the world through a fake social media profile.
You should always be on the lookout for such fake accounts and report them as soon as you find them
These were a few of the most useful ways of preventing your website from negative SEO practices and following these tips on a regular basis can enhance your SEO better.
