Know About Negative SEO:
Negative SEO attacks happen to be a set of activities that are aimed at lowering a competitor’s rankings in search results. These activities tend to often be off-page such as building unnatural links to the site or scraping and reposting its content. However, in some cases, it has also been observed that they involve hacking the site or modifying its content. Below we have mentioned some of the most commonly used negative SEO tactics which are used to ruin a competitor’s rankings. Take a look at them and also find out how you can stay safe from them.
Link Farms
One or two links that are spammy won’t likely hurt your website. This is why negative SEO attacks usually tend to involve building links that are from a group of interconnected sites or link farms. Generally, most of these links always use the same anchor text. Now, these exact-match anchors may be unrelated to the site under attack or sometimes they might also include a niche keyword which makes the site’s link profile look like the owner is trying to manipulate it.
You can always try to spot the early attempts of this type of negative SEO attacks and try to reverse the damage. To do that, you have to make sure that you regularly monitor link profile growth. SEO SpyGlass, for instance, gives good progress graphs for both the number of links in your profile and the number of referring domains. Therefore you can give it a try. Always try to keep in mind that an unusual spike in either of those graphs can be a reason enough for you to take a look into the links you seem to have suddenly acquired.
Scraping
Another way, your competitor can ruin your rankings is by scraping your content and copying it across several other sites. When Google tends to find a particular piece of content being duplicated across multiple sites, it usually picks only one version to rank. This is why your competitors try to rank the “stolen” version first. You can keep yourself away from this type of attack by using a tool called Copyscape. This tool helps your find instances of content duplication. Now, if you do end up finding any scraped copies of your content, then first try to contact the webmaster and then ask them to remove the piece. If that turns out to be not effective then you can report the scraper using Google’s copyright infringement report.
Crawling Your Site Forcefully
There exists many examples of site owners who try to desperately crash their competitor’s site by forcefully crawling it. This ends up causing a heavy server load. If the Googlebot can’t seem to access a site a few times in a row then it gets deranged. Now, if you notice that your site has become slow or unavailable, then you can contact your hosting company or webmaster and they will be able to let you know where exactly the load is coming from. This brings us to the end of our discussion on negative SEO attacks. Now, do let us know some of your thoughts on the same.
