Negative SEO: Protecting Yourself

Statistically speaking, your likelihood of being directly affected by negative SEO is actually relatively low. Nevertheless, it does exist, does happen and does have the potential to wreak havoc with your business.

In the simplest of terms, negative SEO refers to anything done by outside parties to either harm your rankings or redirect traffic elsewhere. It’s sometimes used to hijack traffic for material gains, though can also be used for no reason other than to destroy your reputation and business. And as it can be very difficult to reverse once you’ve been attacked, the best approach is to keep your eye out for anything suspicious and protect your business on an on-going basis.

Perform Regular Link Audits

For example, link audits represent an important SEO tool in general and can be very helpful in detecting negative SEO. You basically need to keep a constant eye on the links pointing toward your site and those your site features. Should any turn out to be spammy, fraudulent or invalid, your SEO prowess could take a hit.

Monitor Site Speed

Never forget that these days, Google pays close attention to the speed and overall performance of your website when determining its SERP rankings. Which is precisely why many negative SEO attacks target overall speed and performance, which can and often do make a big difference in terms of rankings.

Check for Scraped Content

This basically refers to the all-too common process of content being directly lifted from your website and published word for word elsewhere. The attacker may then subsequently claim that the copy is their own, which will lead to your site being penalised for duplicating their content. If not, the fact that the copy is repeated any number of times in various locations could automatically affect your rankings.

Check Google My Business

The occasional negative review tends to be both inevitable and potentially beneficial for your business. However, if it seems as if you are unfairly and inexplicably attracting negative press from all over the place, it could be that someone is trying to do your reputation damage with fake reviews. All of which is precisely why it is important to keep tabs on your online reputation at all times.

Upgrade Your Security

Last but not least, the single most effective way of protecting yourself from the kind of negative SEO that happens directly on your website itself is to upgrade the security of your site. Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t always blatantly obvious when hackers have made their way through some kind of back door and done their bidding with your coding. Quite the opposite, as with negative SEO it’s more a case of sneaking in, wreaking havoc and making it as difficult as possible for the changes to be detected. So for obvious reasons, it simply makes sense to protect yourself to the highest possible extent.

Five Ways to Wreck Your SERP Score with Google

It seems the one constant in the whole digital marketing landscape over recent years has been the importance of SEO. Or more specifically, achieving solid SERP performance. And as far as the immediate outlook is concerned at least, it doesn’t look as if things are about to change anytime soon.

That said, the one thing that has changed beyond recognition is the list of errors and oversights that can get you in trouble. Reaching the top spot with Google has never been more difficult – doing yourself a disservice has never been simpler. Which is exactly what a surprising number of online businesses are doing right now.

To just look at things from a slightly alternative perspective, here’s a rundown of five guaranteed ways to wreck your SERP score with Google:

1. Anything black hat

First up, there’s really no sense in listing the various examples of black hat SEO techniques you should be avoiding. The reason being that all black hat SEO should be avoided at all costs. Even if it’s the kind of thing you’d once get away with, or genuinely believe you’ve hidden sufficiently from view. These days, there are no short cuts to positive SEO whatsoever – trying to find them will only ever land you in hot water.

2. Duplicate content

As time goes by, the rules in terms of duplicate content are also becoming more and more severe. Bad enough when there’s duplicate content within the same site, even worse when the same content appears in different locations. Whatever your excuse, Google sees duplicate content as nothing more than lazy and of poor quality for web users. Even if you don’t agree, you still need to abide by the rules.

3. Too much guest blogging

You know how guest blogging can be a great way of an invaluable and abundant backlink? Well, as far as Google is concerned, too much of a good thing is bad. Just to clarify, guest blogging should in no way be considered black hat or inadvisable. It can actually be enormously beneficial and positive. Nevertheless, any kind of duplicate, poor-quality or spun content used for guest blogging is exactly the kind of thing that could reflect bad on you. Both in terms of your reputation and your SERP score.

4. Site performance issues

The problem with this particular consideration is that it didn’t use to be a consideration at all. At one time, you could get away with a website that wasn’t particularly speedy, reliable or easy to navigate. These days, all these things and everything else to do with performance are taken into account and considered accordingly. Which in turn means that even if your site’s content is no less than outstanding, it could be rendered redundant if site performance isn’t up to scratch.

5. Poor security

Last but not least, there’s nothing quite like being kicked when you’re already down. It’s not as if getting hacked isn’t bad enough. Nevertheless, evidence of hacking suggests that your website may have serious security issues – something that doesn’t go down well with Google. The long and short of it therefore being that as far as security is concerned, there’s no such thing as overprotecting your website.