It is very important to stay updated if you’re in the SEO industry because it changes in a jiffy. And thus, marketers have to change their strategies dramatically when it comes to SEO. Keyword stuffing and ranking on google through direct methods is not a cakewalk now as it was 3 years ago.
A new kind of SEO has recently emerged and it’s called “Negative SEO”. Yep, Negative SEO is the upgraded version of black hat SEO.
In this blog, we’ll discuss how you can protect your website from the effects of Negative SEO and this blog has started sounding like a guide on surviving omicron. If building a brand online is your top priority then you should protect your website from negative SEO.
If you’re still wondering what negative SEO is…Let’s first understand the meaning of Negative SEO.
What is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO aka Black Hat SEO is the practice of using malicious tactics to improve ranking on the SERPs. Negative SEO was easy to execute in the past but with Google’s new algorithm update, it has become very complex and sophisticated.
Some of the Negative SEO practices are as follows:
- Link Farming
- Modified Content
- Duplicate Content
- Fake Social Media Profiles
- Forceful crawling
- Including Malware
- Click Spam
Now, let’s discuss some of the methods through which you can protect your website from Negative SEO:
5 Ways of Protecting your website from Negative SEO:
1. Use Google Webmaster Tools Email Alerts
Google Webmaster Tools Email Alerts helps you identify issues in your website and the URLs that are affected by those issues. This tool sends you an alert when:
- The website is threatened by a malware invasion
- The pages of your website are not indexed
- Your website has connectivity problems
- Google send you a manual penalty
To connect your website with Google Webmaster Tools, Go to your account and click on “webmaster tools preference”. To receive alerts on various kinds of issues on your website, enable email notifications. Click “Save”
Enabling email notifications will be your first step towards Negative SEO-proofing your website.
2. Keep a check on your backlinks profile
To stop spammers from succeeding, it is important to keep track of your backlinks profile. Some of your competitors might practice Negative SEO against your website by backlinking low-quality links or redirects.
So, It is vital that you’re informed when someone is creating links and redirects to your website.
Tools like Ahrefs and Open Site Explorer helps you find out to manually check links built to your website. There is one highly recommended website that can help you in tracing backlinks and redirects, and that is MonitorBacklinks.com. It is one of the most effective and convenient tools that send email alerts regarding your website’s backlinks activities.
3. Keep your important backlinks safe
SEO black hat techniques can get really dark sometimes. Sometimes, your competitors can try removing the best backlinks from your website. To do this, they reach out to the owner of the link in your name and request them to remove the backlink from your website.
You can use the following methods for preventing the spammers from removing the backlinks from your website:
- While interacting with your webmaster, use your domain email id instead of using email Ids like yahoo or google. This would make your email id or the user of the email Id look more authoritative.
- Secondly, you can track the activity of your backlinks with backlinks tracking tools such as MonitorBacklinks.com. You can add tags to the backlinks that are important. Review your backlinks from time to time to make sure that none of them are removed.
4. Protect your site from Malware
One of the worst things that can happen with your website is your website getting spammed without you knowing about it. These are the following ways how you can protect your website from malware and hackers:
- For WordPress users, set up the Google Authenticator Plugin and create a 2-step verification password. Each time you or your team log in to your WordPress website, they’ll need to enter the code generated by Google Authenticator on your phone.
- While creating your password on Google Authenticator, make sure you create a strong one with numbers and characters
- Create backups of your database regularly
- Install antivirus to prevent malware on your website
5. Enquire for duplicate content
One of the most common Black Hat SEO tactics used by spammers is content duplication. To rank down your website they can post your website’s content everywhere possible. If Google finds out that your content is duplicate, It might penalize your website and decrease its ranking.
To check if your website’s content is duplicated and posted on the internet, you can use Copyscape.com. To check this, insert your website or the content of the website you want to verify in the tool. It will show where else your content has been published without your permission.
Conclusion
The competition is stiff on the internet. In such cases, often, spammers use various black hat tactics to let your website down and steal your ranking. As a website owner or marketer, It is important that you be updated and informed about the possible attacks on your website. The aforementioned are some methods that can save your website from Negative SEO and sustain your ranking on the SERPs. To learn more about the topics such as SEO, Growth Flywheel, business strategies, etc, visit https://quaffmedia.com/blog/