How to Protect Your Website from Negative SEO
How to Protect Your Website from Negative SEO
The entire SEO industry experienced a major change over the last two years. That’s why many online marketers have drastically changed their strategies. Higher ranking on Google for competitive keywords is not as easy as it was three years ago.
Because black Hat is hard and difficult to execute SEO, and there is less and less chance of giving results, “Negative SEO” has emerged as a new type of SEO.
This is a guide that will help you understand what a negative SEO is and how you can save your website and business from negative SEO. If you are serious about making your brand online and protecting it, then it is something you should not ignore.
What is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO refers to the destruction of a competitor’s ranking in search engines by using black hat and unethical techniques. Negative SEO attacks can take many different forms:
- Website Hacking
- Creating hundreds or thousands of spam links on your website
- Distributing copied content from website across the Internet
- Point your website link using keywords like Viagra, Poker Online, and many more
- Create a fake social profile and waste your reputation online
- Removing the Best Backlinks to Your Website
Prevent your website from Negative SEO
- Set up Google Webmaster Tools email alerts
Google can send you an email alert when:
- Your website is being attacked by malware
- Your pages are not indexed
- You have problems with server connectivity
- You get a manual penalty from Google
- If you are not already, connect your website to Google Webmaster Tools.
To activate e-mail alert log in to your account and click on “Webmaster Tools Preferences”
Enable email notifications and choose to receive alerts for all types of issues. Click “Save”. This is just the first step. Now, take the important step to monitor your backlink profile.
2. Monitor Your Backlinks Profile
This is the most important action to prevent spammers from being successful. Most often, they will display negative SEO against your website by creating low-quality links or redirection. It is important to know that when someone is making links or redirects to your website.
From time to time, you can use tools such as Ahrefs or Open Site Explorer, to check manually whether someone is creating links to your website or not, but the advice I recommend to use is MonitorBacklinks.com. This is the best and easiest tool to send email alerts to you if you lose your website or significant backlinks.
Instead of manually checking your backlinks every morning, the monitor backlink sends everything you need to know in your inbox. Here’s how you can use it:
Once you create your account, you will need to add your domain and add it to your Google Analytics account.
Furthermore, it shows your backlinks immediately, but sometimes it can take some time. By default settings, you are set to send you email notifications when your website receives new backlinks.
3. Protect Your Best Backlinks
Many times, spammers will try to remove your best backlinks. They usually contact your website’s link owner using your name, and they request the webmaster to remove your backlink.
To prevent this from occurring, you can do two things:
- When you communicate with webmasters, instead of using Gmail or Yahoo, use an email address from your domain. In this way, you will prove that you work for the website and this is not someone else but you are pretending to be you. Your email should look like yourname@yourdomain.com
- Take care of your best backlinks. For this, you can use the monitor backlinks again. Visit your list of backlinks and order them by page rank or social activity.
Add tags to the backlinks you care about most, so that you can verify that none of them has been deleted.
Select your backlink and click “Edit”
Add your tag, so that you can easily filter and find these backlinks later.
After you create your list, filter them by your tags, and monitor whether their status changes. If any of these links are removed, then you should contact the webmaster and ask why they removed your link.
4. Secure Your Website from Malware and Hackers
Security is extremely important. The last thing you want is spam on your website, without even knowing it about you. There are several things to secure your website:
- For WordPress users, install the Google Authenticator plugin and create a 2-step verification password. Every time you log in to your WordPress website, you must add the code generated by Google Authenticator (available on iOS and Android) to your smartphone.
- Create a strong password with numbers and special characters.
- Make backups of your files and databases regularly.
- If your website allows users to upload files, talk to your hosting company and ask them how to install an antivirus to prevent malware.
5. Check Content Duplicacy
The use of one of the most common spammers is content duplication. They copy the content of your website and can post it everywhere. If most of your content is duplicated, there is a great possibility that your website will be penalized and the ranking will be lost.
You can see that there are duplicate pages on the Internet using Copyscape.com on your website. Simply add your website or the body of the article that you want to verify, and it will show you whether your content is being published elsewhere without your permission.
That’s all!
