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How to Protect Your Site from Negative SEO Attacks?

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rajesh kumar
How to Protect Your Site from Negative SEO Attacks?

Cleaning Up a Negative SEO Attacks with Real Info Point

If you are blogging for a while you must have heard about Negative SEO Attacks, right?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization that helps your website to rank better in the Google SERP.

But what about Negative SEO Attacks, have you ever heard of negative SEO?

No!

Not an issue.

In this post, I will be sharing some practical tips to protect your site from negative SEO along with what is negative SEO and why you should take care of that.

Let’s dive in.

What is Negative SEO?

As the name specifies, Negative SEO Attacks simply means lower down the rankings of your competitors in the search engines or making any harm to their sites by using the Black hat or unethical techniques.

It may involve

  • Website Hacking
  • Plagiarism (Duplicate Content)
  • Spamming (One can make spam links to your website)
  • Backlinks destruction, or even
  • Misrepresenting your reputation online

All and all, Negative SEO Attacks can ruin your online career.

So, one should take care of that to protect your site from being hit by hackers and negative SEO.

Actionable Tips to Protect Your Site from Negative SEO Attacks

  1. Use Google Webmaster Tools

The very first thing you can do to protect your site from negative SEO set up email alerts with Google Webmaster tools.

Google Webmaster Tools

This way you will get emails from Google itself, whenever your site gets attacked by any malware activities.

Moreover, you will be notified of the indexing problem, server connectivity issues, and Google penalties.

So start with connecting your website with Google Webmaster tools and enable email notifications.

  1. Audit Backlinks Profile

This is a very important aspect of protecting your website from negative SEO.

Audit Backlinks

Backlinks are the links pointing towards your site. Linking could be direct to your domain or any Individual web page of your site.

A huge number of backlinks are made on a daily basis, and one can perform negative SEO on your website by making spam links to your website.

So, it’s very important to analyze your site backlinks profile.

How many backlinks it has, what are the referring domains, their spam score, and all?

You can use some of the most popular SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Ubersuggest, etc. to audit your site backlinks profile.

  1. Best Backlinks Protection

You know backlinks from high authority sites are very crucial for your website. And that’s the reason spammers try to remove these backlinks first by sending mails to the webmasters of these websites.

So, you should make a separate list of the best backlinks of your website and keep tracking those whether they are active or lost.

Important Tip: You must use your professional email address while you contact webmasters as this confirms that you are an authorized person of that website.

By doing so, it would likely be difficult for spammers to contact webmasters in the future.

  1. Implement Website Security

Prevention is better than a cure.

So it’s better to implement the web site security to prevent your site from hackers and spammers.

What you can do to embed security to your website.

  • Choose a strong password to login
  • Use any plugin for 2-factor authentication
  • Take backups of all your site files regularly
  • Install antivirus to prevent malware activities
  1. Track Social Media Platforms

You also need to monitor social media platforms whether any fake profile exists with your name or your company name.

Social Media Platforms

Social media is on the boom from the last few years and that’s why spammer are more active on these platforms that lead to fraudulent activities.

So, you must check for fake profiles and try to remove them by marking them as spam.

You can also use some automation tools like Mention to make your job easier.

  1. Remove Fake Reviews

Next, you can check for if someone is doing the fake reviews on your business profile.

It will not only harm your business brand value but also your personal brand value.

If you found so without any genuine reason, then surely that person doesn’t like you and want to damage your reputation online.

So, it’s your job to find out these types of people as soon as possible and get rid of them.

Fortunately, Google My Business allows you to do so!

  1. Remove Plagiarism

Plagiarism is again a big threat to your website rankings. A lot of content is copied intentionally or unintentionally which results in duplicate content on the web.

Google penalized these sites having duplicate content that leads to a loss in rankings

So it’s better to keep tracking your top articles for plagiarism with the help of some plagiarism checker tools like Duplichecker, Grammarly, Copyscape, etc.

  1. Analyze Website Speed

You can also monitor your website speed and if you find something suspicious contact your hosting provider immediately.

If you feel very high loading speed or very low all of a sudden, it could be because of hackers or spammer that may put your server down.

So keep an eye on your site speed regularly.

You can take advantage of some tools like GTmetrix, Pingdom, Google PageSpeed Insights, etc.

  1. Look After Your Own SEO Strategies

The next thing you can consider to protect your website from negative SEO is to look into your own SEO strategies.

This may sound silly, but you never know which strategy of your affecting your website rankings.

Here is a checklist you can perform to get rid of negative SEO.

  • Check whether you have any link to the penalized sites
  • Don’t do low-quality guest posting
  • Never buy backlinks
  • Use “nofollow”, “dofollow” attributes properly
  • Use the target tag appropriately
  1. Handle Online Criticism Carefully

Last but not least is to handle criticism in the right way.

You may come across some situations where you have to face criticism as well.

You never know who is a spammer and what his motive behind the criticism. It could be because they want to –

  • Show you down
  • Make fun of you
  • Take Revenge
  • Outrank you in any way, and so on.

So, you should be prepared for that and you should handle the criticism in the right way.

Remember, you are here to do business, not to make grudges.

Conclusion

I have shared an overview of what negative SEO is all about and how it can damage your website.

Most importantly, I have also shared some actionable tips that can prevent your website from negative SEO.

So, if you don’t want to see you’re all hard work go in vain, start implementing these tips to protect your website from hackers and negative SEO.

Still have any question or feedback, please do comment below, we’ll be happy to help you.

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rajesh kumar
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