8 Ways Webmasters Can Prevent Their Website from Negative SEO

Negative SEO is a malicious activity whereby online hackers use spammy links, black hat and other unethical SEO techniques to distort a competitor’s website and sabotaging its rankings in search engines. These online hacks are so dangerous to a website and can take the following forms;

  • Hacking one’s own website
  • Creating spammy links to your website
  • Distributing copied content/ content scrapping
  • Using inappropriate and negative keywords to point to your website
  • Ruining your online reputation by creating fake social media accounts and profiles

It goes without saying that negative Search Engine Optimization techniques can be of great harm to your website. If you own a business website, you are most likely to accrue great amounts of losses when you face this problem. Negative SEO can easily ruin your reputation and make your customers shy away. It is therefore crucial that you put up the best measures to prevent your website from negative SEO. Here are some of the measures that you can put in place to prevent yourself from falling victim to negative SEO. 

Carry Out Regular Backlink Audits

The first measure is to perform regular checks to your links. This ensures that your website remains safe from negative SEO attacks. You must do a daily check of the growth and performance of your link profiles so that to prevent them from unanticipated detriments. There are different ways in which links to your website can be affected. A hacker can either alter the content and include spammy links to your website or he can do a modification to your link and redirect them to his website. All cases are so detrimental and can be very hard to identify. Conducting regular audits can be of great help in combating such instances and can also help identify possible cyberattacks.

Keep track on Your Website Speed

The speed of your website is a key factor when it comes to ranking.  People will spend only 3-4 seconds on a website to decide about to browse a website further. It is therefore very crucial that you keep track of your website speed and make sure that it does not become sluggish. To do this, you can use a crawling software that establishes the cause of slow website speed. One major cause for slow website speeds is poor website designs that have heavy content. Spams can also be a major cause of a sluggish website. Using tools like Pingdom.com can help in monitoring the speeds of your website. However, in a situation where you can establish the main reason behind the sluggishness of your website, then you should consider contacting your website host to help you solve the problem.

Find Out If Your Content is Scrapped

Content scraping refers to the malicious process of lifting content and pasting it directly to other websites. The attacker will then make claims that the content is original and that he owns it. An issue arises when google ends seeing the copied content as original and end up ranking the content higher than your own. This comes with severe consequences as google may issue penalties, get your website devalued by the search engines, therefore, losing rankings.

There are several tools that you can use to stay safe from these consequences brought about by content scraping. Copyscape is one of the commonly used tools to find plagiarism. It is also necessary that you request the webmaster to remove the spammy content. You can also report immediately to google when you realize that your content has been scrapped. 

Upgrade Your Website Security to Protect It from Malware and Hackers

Website security is a vital factor. Protecting your website from cyberattacks protects your website and business. There are several steps that you can take to ensure that your website is free from any form of attack. installing an SSL certificate is one of those measures that can be very helpful. Many SSL providers are there to fulfill website security’s demand. However, initially, the cost plays a major role so, we can consider one of the cheapest SSL providers naming SSL2BUY. You can acquire an SSL certificate and get your website to HTTPS. SSL certificate helps in boosting Google ranking.  

Monitor Your Social Media Mentions and Check Fake Social Media Accounts

Malicious people are always on the lookout to create fake social media accounts in the name of your company or business. You should be on the lookout to identify these accounts and take appropriate actions by reporting them as spam before they start engaging in malicious activities. To check whether someone is using your brand name, you can use like Mention.net which informs you when someone mentions your name on social media and thus can help you take appropriate actions.  

Monitor Customer Reviews

Customers who give negative reviews to your business about the products or services you offer can contribute a great deal to ruining the reputation of your business. You ought to be careful because some competitors may be behind these reviews to ruin your reputation and create a bad brand identity for your business. To deal with this problem, you have to evaluate Google My Business Listing to help you identify and deal with the problem.

Keep Track on the CTR of Your Keywords

Click-through rate (CTR) is a method that can be used to establish the number of visitors to your ad and how many of them clicked it. CTR hence helps you to assess the quality of your content and its ability to drive traffic to your website. The attackers can, however, use it to increase the bounce rate of your website by targeting specific keywords. This can have some negative effects on the website ranking in the SERP. You must regularly monitor your keywords to make sure that this kind of attack does not occur.

Frequently Monitor Your SERP Ranking

Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) Ranking should be frequently checked to ensure that the website is protected from negative SEO. The reason for a drop-in site ranking might be due to malicious attempts to do so by hackers. A rank tracking software can be of great when it comes to monitoring your google ranking. You must ensure that you have in place the best white hat SEO techniques that improve your website ranking. These techniques should be acceptable by google.

Summary

Indulgence in negative SEO practices by your competitors can be very harmful to your website. It can negatively impact your SERP ranking and end up ruining your business reputation that can bring negative impacts to your business. The measures that are outlined above can be of great essence in protecting your business website against such kinds of impacts.

As a quick note, PSDtoWPService provides several web design and development services like PSD to WordPress. If you need any assistance, do contact us.

Help us grow by sharing this Post!

Leave a Comment

Scroll to Top