Negative SEO | That increase website ranking | How to check?
Once you have identified yourself as a victim of negative activity, you can take steps to rectify the situation; it doesn't have to sentence you to death for your business.
That being said, identifying a negative campaign can be harder than it seems.
This article will help you diagnose if your website is affected by negative SEO so that you can spend more time on a broader perspective: problem solving.
What is negative SEO?
Negative SEO is defined as any measure designed to negatively affect the search engine rankings of a particular URL.
Google claims that they have taken security measures to identify and block negative SEO activity, so they are not responsible for any negative strategies that may bypass the safety net.
Instead, they encourage negative SEO victims to contact the webmaster of the relevant website to resolve the issue.
This is Google's official statement regarding negative SEO.
Unfortunately, if someone is really trying to harm your site, chances are they won't do it alone, or at least change your approach because you contact them.
It's worth a try, but more effective steps need to be taken.
How to identify negative advertising campaigns
1. Did your search volume suddenly decrease?
If the answer is yes and you have not made any significant changes yourself, it may be a red flag.
Make sure to regularly check your site's analytics data to quickly determine the decline in search traffic before it causes too much harm.
2. Has Google sent a message that you are taking action in accordance with its guidelines?
This is a very simple way to see if someone is using a negative SEO strategy against you.
If you receive an error message from Google as shown below, but you are not the source of the error, someone may have provided you with the error message.
The image below specifies penalties for links, but the error message you receive may be for many different manual penalties.
The message box in Google Search Console is one of the first sites you want to check if you think there is something wrong with your site.
Google wants you to know if it has been hacked.
3. Has your personal keyword ranking dropped?
Similarly, regularly tracking keyword rankings is only a good practice for SEO, but it is especially useful in the event of a negative attack.
If one day you notice a noticeable drop in the ranking of one or more keywords, something may be wrong.
We hope you use a reliable ranking tracking tool to track your location to easily identify major changes.
4. Are there spikes in your backlinks?
You should monitor links in the same way you monitor keywords, and if you notice that backlinks have surged over time or their quality has changed significantly, it may indicate that your SEO campaigns have been rejected.
It's important to have a tool to monitor backlink activity and even email you when they notice a link change, so you should be able to quickly and easily identify any issues.
If you receive a notification that you are suddenly receiving hundreds of new links, you absolutely need to take steps to prevent those links from damaging your site.
5. Note that blocked links are not displayed
In some cases, the tool will not be able to help. Some websites prevent tools like Moz and Ahrefs from crawling their websites.
If you monitor only these types of resources, you may still ignore dangerous links.
In Google Search Console, you'll find a backlinks report with all the links that Google found to your site.
You will have to manually check links that look suspicious because you won't get as much information as other tools.
With Google Analytics, you can view referral traffic reports to see which sites are likely to attract users to your site.
You can tag anything that looks different and then manually check to see if it is possible to pass a negative SEO campaign targeting your site.
6. Has your backlinks decreased?
Also, please note everything in your backlink profile. Volatility is normal when it comes to links, but if you find that some of the valuable links you are getting are going down, it's important to investigate and find out why.
Negative SEO includes the requirement to remove links. If you recently removed the link, contact the site quickly and ask politely for the reason.
If it was because they were asked to delete it, this situation can now be resolved. You can also take the initiative to let other sites that have a relationship with you know what's going on so they can ignore such requests.
7. Is your content showing up everywhere?
Content scraping is taking your original content, words literally, and posting them on other websites. This is an easy way for anyone who wants to attack you with negative SEO.
If done right, there are many benefits to being able to syndicate content on high-privilege and related sites.
Google provides guidelines on how to make sure you don't hurt your site. They suggested having a link back to the original article.
You can also ask sites hosting content to add noindex at the page level.
Why is this important?
Google warns that they will choose a version to rank in the search results and make available to users, which may or may not be your original content. Therefore, please be careful.
So as a negative SEO strategy, this can be very effective. Pasting your content across the web will result in duplicate content and open up opportunities for other sites to surpass you.
If you notice that a particular page on your website has been deleted, using a tool such as Copyscape will help identify any duplicates of content that may exist on other websites.
8. Do a basic audit of your site
If you haven't noticed any major changes in any of the areas listed above (or even the ones you found), but you just feel something is wrong, please perform a basic review of your website to see how it appears in Google.
You can do this by searching in Google (for example, site: example.com).
For Target, for example, they would type site: target.com .
Google should then return a list of pages on your domain.
Use your best judgment to evaluate these pages and find possible problems.
- Do you identify all the pages listed?
- Are there any pages missing?
- Has any of your pages been downgraded?
These are helpful questions that you can ask yourself.
If you answer "yes" to any of these, you may be a victim of a negative election campaign.
Final conclusion
Knowing that you are hit by negative SEO is the first step to solving the problem.
A number of tools are available to help you identify and resolve negative SEO campaigns.
Don't panic.
Work hard for website monitoring and security, and you should be fine with negative penalties (saving some extra time and maybe even a headache).
0 Comments