How to Handle Negative SEO
Not a lot of people have been a victim of a negative SEO attack, but for those who have, it’s generally not pretty. This type of activity may result in lost revenue and damaged reputations. Let alone all the time and effort you’ve spent getting your sites positioned well in Google.
So, you might ask, what does a negative SEO attack look like? Some common ways an evil webmaster can try and take you down includes tactics like creating a huge amount of links to your pages, using spam keywords or even all of your page’s primary keywords. (Google sees this as link manipulation) The may also directly hack into your server, and in some cases impersonate you online in social media. In order to help you be prepared for the fight against negative SEO, we’ve included 5 ways you can be aware of what’s going on with your site.
5 Strategies for handling Negative SEO
Use alerts – One of the best aspects of Google Webmaster tools is that it can send you email alerts whenever your site is under various types of attacks, such as if you have a malware problem, pages are not indexed and others.
Look at your backlink profile – One way negative SEO may harm you is if you get a sudden spike in backlinks that are of the spammy variety. You’ll need to especially be mindful for any spam keywords. A site like monitorBacklinks.com is useful.
Listen for social media mentions – Be sure to set up alerts on a service like Mention.net to monitor anytime anyone talks about you or your brand. Social media can catch fire quickly, so this is extremely important.
Check for duplicate content – An old school technique used by people set on harming your SEO is copying your content and pasting it all over the Web. Having the same content everywhere on the Web is an easy way incur a Google site penalty.
Make your site secure – The last thing you want is having some hacker come along and actually hack their way onto your site. This is especially true if you are on a WordPress platform, as it has had numerous security flaws over the years.