{"id":112939,"date":"2017-10-03T17:51:56","date_gmt":"2017-10-03T09:51:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seo-hacker.com\/?p=12939"},"modified":"2021-05-11T05:51:20","modified_gmt":"2021-05-11T05:51:20","slug":"negative-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seo-hacker.com\/negative-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Prevent and Protect yourself from Negative SEO"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Negative<\/a>Negative SEO has been around for quite some time and it still prevails up to this day and age. It can damage your website and make you lose valuable rankings. But are there protective measures for it? Can you prevent and protect your website from negative SEO attacks? Yes, you can.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The release of the Penguin update only increased the effects<\/a> of negative SEO. Fortunately, Google released some solutions<\/a> that can control it, but the overall defense against negative SEO is still up to, us, the SEO specialists. But what does negative SEO really mean?<\/p>\n

\"Negative<\/a>Negative SEO<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Negative SEO could be considered as the \u201cfoul play\u201d of the SEO industry. It is the practice of using black hat SEO techniques<\/a> to de-rank competitors. It could be a powerful tactic if done correctly. However, it\u2019s still disliked by the majority of the SEO community, and its practitioners are not doing anything helpful towards the SEO industry.<\/p>\n

Negative SEO can happen in a variety of ways. It could be through numerous spammy links, forceful crawling, and, in rare cases, plagiarism. However, if you\u2019re diligent enough, you can prevent these attacks from causing irreversible harm to your website.<\/p>\n

In case you are a victim, a potential target for attacks, or you simply want to protect your website, here are ways in which you can detect and prevent negative SEO from harming your website.<\/p>\n

Link Audits<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Routinely auditing links is a good practice that most SEO specialists do. Fortunately, link audits<\/a> can also help you detect if you are the target of a negative SEO attack. Constant monitoring of your link profile\u2019s growth can help you discover suspicious link activity before it causes further harm to your website.<\/p>\n

A standard graph of your link profile growth should look something like this:<\/p>\n

\"cognitive<\/a><\/p>\n

However, if you notice a sudden increase or decrease and you have not worked on any link building campaigns<\/a>, it should be a clear sign of a potential attack.<\/p>\n

\"cognitive<\/a><\/p>\n

This attack happened<\/a> to WP Bacon, a WordPress podcast site, back in 2014. It was the target of link farm spam that gave it more than a thousand links with the anchor text \u201cporn movie\u201d. This caused a major drop of more than 50 spots in the rankings for the majority of its main keywords.<\/p>\n

Luckily, they immediately disavowed the attacking domain and was able to recover their rankings and traffic.<\/p>\n

\"WPBacon<\/a><\/p>\n

You can use a link auditing software like CognitiveSEO<\/a> or manually audit your links, just as long as you are able to properly monitor your link profile\u2019s growth. If you are already a victim of link farm spamming, immediately notify Google and disavow all the suspicious links.<\/p>\n

Content Scraping<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Content scraping is the process of taking content from a much more authoritative website and publishing it as your own. This happens because not everyone is good at content creation<\/a> which leads them to plagiarize content.<\/p>\n

It is worth noting that content scraping is done by small, underperforming websites, and not by authoritative, high-performing websites. Consequently, the usual victim of scraping are the high-performing websites.<\/p>\n

If you are the victim of content scraping, you can expect consequences if the copied content gets indexed before yours. Your page might lose value and consequently, lead to a decrease in rankings.<\/p>\n

You can use tools such as Copyscape to find copies of your content on the web. If you find a domain that has plagiarized your content, you can either ask the webmaster of the site to remove it or report them by using Google\u2019s Copyright Removal<\/a> form. You can use the form by filling out all the necessary information that Google needs and submitting it. This is what it looks like:<\/p>\n

\"Google<\/a><\/p>\n

Keyword CTR<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Bartosz Goralewicz experienced<\/a> something unnatural with a client\u2019s site back in 2014. The site was receiving more than a thousand visits that landed on a certain page that would instantly bounce. Since user experience is an important signal, the high bounce rate looked like very bad UX.<\/p>\n

He found out that somebody had actually programmed a bot to target specific keywords that his client ranked for, it lands on the page, and then bounces right after, which leads to the creation of a false SERP bounce rate.<\/p>\n

You can detect this attack by regularly monitoring the CTR of your keywords. To monitor, you can use Google Search Console. You can do this by:<\/p>\n