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What is a Negative SEO Attack?

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Mayank Deep
What is a Negative SEO Attack?

It's also known as "Black Hat SEO" or "Negative SEO," this practice includes manipulating your site's search engine rankings to benefit a competitor's site at the expense of your own. It used to be easy to hijack your site with suspicious banner advertisements in the past. Today's negative SEO, on the other hand, is much more sophisticated.

 

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Examples Of Negative SEO:


  • Using black hat techniques, such as link farming, to artificially inflate your website's search engine rankings is an example of negative SEO.
  • Material Duplication: One of the simplest ways spammers penalize your site is to copy and paste your content across other websites all over the internet.
  • Execution of header or footer template scripts that modify content.
  • Negative reviews posted on social media might affect you if you have a fake social media profile. Often, spammers target a company's social media accounts by establishing accounts using the company's name and uploading low-quality content in an attempt to harm the company's image.
  • Change the robots.txt file on the server to remove your site from search results.
  • When it comes to bad SEO, slowing down a website is a simple approach to inflict harm. Negative SEO practitioners may lower or de-rank your site by systematically scanning it, draining the server's resources, and finally crashing it.
  • When a CTR bot is taught to hunt for certain keywords and brand phrases on a website, it clicks on the listing and is immediately sent back to the search engine request page. This is called "click fraud." When Google suspects that the site owner is attempting to "game the system," the site is removed from search results. Google may alert visitors that "this site may have been hacked" before forwarding, which may cause traffic to drop.

 

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Anti-SEO Attacks on your Website: What You Need to Know


  • The proactive webmaster is not satisfied with Google's claims. Fortunately, there are a number of preventative measures you may take to safeguard your site.
  • Email notifications should be enabled. Google's Search Engine Management Tool. You may now keep all of your website's troubles and concerns at the forefront of your mind. There are a number of ways to avoid bad SEO, including monitoring backlinks, disavowing (or deleting) questionable backlinks, and protecting your website from malware/hackers.
  • Check out your backlinks on a regular basis to ensure they are still relevant. SEMrush and other online visibility management solutions may help you keep track of your backlinks through email. One of the most popular methods used by negative SEO practitioners is to build links from low-quality domains.
  • Keep an eye on your most crucial connections. The SEMrush tool is once again indispensable. Be informed if any of your most significant backlinks are taken down. Contact the webmasters of the sites and request that important backlinks be reinstated, so that you do not lose your position in the search engine results page (SERP).
  • Your website should be protected from hackers and viruses at all times. It's never been more critical to protect your website against severe malware assaults in light of recent high-profile hacks and pricey data breaches. Fortunately, there are a number of simple and low-cost options available to you, including the following:
  1. Creating a password that is hard to guess for the administrator.
  2. Making use of two-factor authentication wherever it is possible
  3. Upkeep of a current website
  4. Using security plugins You can learn more about the security features built into HubSpot's offerings here.)
  • Be on the lookout for content swindlers and copycats. There may be additional versions of your text on the Internet, and Copyscape and Grammarly may help you track them down and prevent inadvertent plagiarism.
  • Monitor Your Online Mentions: Through your social page dashboards, you may take an active part in social media management. There are social listening apps like Hootsuite and Social Mention that notify you when your name is referenced on social media. When references are made, make sure you address any issues immediately and swiftly to prevent negative news from spreading.
  • Speed Up Your Website Loading Time. Google Analytics Alerts provide you notifications when your website loading speed slows down, so you can pinpoint when and why it’s occurring. You may need to activate cache, remove resource-hogging plugins or add-ons, optimize your picture sizes, get rid of superfluous code, or take efforts to stop spammer activity.

 

Final Thoughts on Negative SEO

Negative SEO occurs. The most you can do, as a company website owner, is to keep knowledgeable on the numerous methods in which it happens, remain cautious, and employ the newest technologies to defend yourself. To learn digital marketing in a better way, you may pursue a comprehensive course.

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