Negative SEO: What Is This Strategy and How It Can Harm Your Site
SEO is a marketing strategy used on the Internet to improve the visibility of a particular domain to search engines.
This method is used to make the site stand out on search engines through the use of keywords, interesting titles in the text, internal and external links, among others.
Negative SEO, on the other hand, is an action contrary to SEO. While the latter works to leverage the site, the former is done to bring down another domain on the result pages.
What is Negative SEO?
The practice of SEO is linked to the production of content for websites and blogs and is done through a set of unfair actions performed with the intention of harming the positioning of a site in search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo, for example.
It is usually done to bring down pages that have reached the top cleanly. The people responsible for these attacks are competing companies or pages that hire the services of hackers to attack these sites and implement some features that go against the search engines' guidelines.
Some of these features are:
Copying content from the page to be published on other sites and vice versa;
Sending spam/virus links that point to the attacked site;
Inclusion of keywords that have no connection with the theme of the contents;
Among others.
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Example of negative SEO
Imagine that you are the owner of a pest control company whose site is among the first positions when the keyword searched for is "price rat pest control".
It may seem like a small thing, but in times where people search the Internet before hiring a service, taking such a position in Google is a great asset.
With this in mind, a competitor company has hired a hacker to break into their website and apply negative SEO. He copies the content on the subject and distributes it all over the internet.
After this, Google identified his content as duplicate and penalized him. Thus, your site plummeted in the ranking of contents about rat pest control and became among the last pest control companies in the search engine.
All this caused visits to your site to decrease, which compromised the prospecting of new customers and thus your business.
How can you protect yourself against these attacks?
From the above scenario, you can see that taking care of your website's security should be part of your job. So keep an eye out for the following measures:
Watch out for viruses and malware
It is very annoying when we access a website and are faced with a multitude of viruses. Isn't it?
So always make sure that your site is a safe place for internet users. Constantly watch for malicious programs and delete them immediately.
Always remember that if your site is the source of them and sends them to users you will be punished and will lose the good reputation you have built.
Create a file for link rejection
Always keep an eye on your backlinks. If they are producing bad content or unqualified links, try to remove them so as not to damage your reputation.
If this is not possible, reject them. This can be done in the following way:
If you own an engineering design firm whose site suffers from this problem, let Google know.
Download the list of backlinks made by your site. Then, create a file with this list of links to be rejected and send it to the search engine to warn that it does not accept them on purpose.
Check the loading speed of the site
Site speed corruption also occurs when negative SEO is introduced. That's because part of ranking well comes from the experience the user had on your page.
If he cannot navigate quickly, he will not stay long on the site, which signals to Google that your domain does not deliver a good experience and should not occupy the top positions.
Therefore, watch the speed of your site to know if it has not been compromised by possible attacks.
Always check the content that is published
As said before, repeated content is liable to punishment in Google. So be careful that you are not publishing material that has already been published incorrectly.
For example, if you own an automotive website and you are going to talk about positive pressure spray booths, you can even post a text that has already been published, however, it must be accompanied by proper credits.
If this is not done, Google's robots understand that there is something wrong and can exclude your link on the subject from search results.
Pay attention to the mentions made to your site
On social networks and partner sites, mentions are always made about the marketed product, whether physical or intellectual. In this way, they become great weapons to make attacks on your site.
It all works in the following way:
Let's suppose you own a real estate company. In order to tarnish your company's image, a hacker has created several fake profiles to badmouth your services, be they sales, condo consortium, or service in general.
Such comments can destroy your reputation through untruthful messages. Basically, Internet users will see the comments and will not trust you to close a deal, choosing other companies.
Be careful not to sabotage your own site
You may be asking yourself if this is possible. And the answer is yes! But rest assured, we will show you how you can avoid doing harm.
Don't link to sites that have already been penalized by Google;
Serve the same content to users and to the robots that will scan your site periodically;
Don't use hidden keywords in the source code;
Do not publish an excessive amount of promotion posts;
And, above all: don't buy links. They don't usually have good credibility for the mechanisms.
Be aware and take care of your business
As we can see, Negative SEO can even lead to the expulsion of your site from the search rankings, thus ending your visibility in the digital world.
To prevent this from happening, follow the tips above and keep studying deeper to discover other ways to protect yourself.