How to Protect Your Site from Negative SEO Attack

7 Tips to Prevent a Website against Negative SEO Negative SEO is the practice of using unethical techniques to harm a competitor’s search engine standings or in easy words a practice of implementing black hat SEO techniques on another site. Sometimes malicious people create spammy links and direct it to your website which leads to a penalty from Google.

Negative SEO is very much prevalent and can be a legitimate danger.

Competitors can use techniques to cause damage to your site. We have listed down 7 tips that can prevent a website against negative SEO. 1.

Keep Your Website Secured: Websites these days are vulnerable to spam, hacking and malware attacks. Thus it is important to keep the websites secure at all times. Make sure to use plugins that gives an authentication to the users and your website is secure from attacks from competitors or other sources. Maintain a strong password for your website and make a habit of maintaining regular backups for your data.

2.

Perform Regular Link Audits: It is good practice for any business to perform regular backlink audits. This can save your website from negative SEO attack. Most of the suspicious activities can be identified with regular link audits. Any unusual rise in the links can be suspicious activity thus a thorough investigation must be done to identify these links. If you monitor your link profile growth carefully at regular intervals, then you can catch an attack before it costs you too much and you are penalised by Google.

3.

Check Your Site Speed: Website speed is an important ranking factor.

You need to identify if your website is sluggish and then you might

7 Tips to Prevent a Website against Negative SEO have to use crawling software to look for anything suspicious. There could be a forceful crawling as well, which causes heavy server load and cause your site to slow down and might even crash. It is best to contact your hosting company if that happens.

4.

Avoid Content Scraping: The one thing that Google hates the most is content scraping. Google will always notice duplicate content and thus it should be avoided at all costs. You also need to make sure that no one copies your content and distributes it all over the internet. If you find that your content is being scraped, you can ask the webmaster to take it down.

5.

Monitor Google My Business: Your brand reputation online will have a lot to do with your business growth. Negative reviews are not good but a few reviews will not impact much. But if there is lieu of negative reviews then it might be a sign that these are fake reviews. You need to act fast before this causes damage to your reputation. Flag the fake reviews from Google My Business and fill out the report form.

6.

Check Your SERP Ranking: A sudden fall in your website rank from the search engine page results can be a result of malicious intent. Thus keep a check on the ranking and complete de-indexing if necessary.

With the latest updates changes are happening faster now. Keep a check on your website’s crawl stats in Google Search Console and make sure the robots.txt file is set up properly.

7.

Monitor Your Social Media Mentions: People can create fake social media accounts for your business website and damage your brand’s name. It is best to keep a check on such profiles and report them as

7 Tips to Prevent a Website against Negative SEO spams before they can harm your brand reputation. There are many tools available that can check all the social media mentions to make you aware of the fake profiles.

Internet today is not completely immune to negative SEO and thus to keep your company from such practices the above tips can prove very useful.

Monitor your website at regular intervals to catch problems before they escalate.