Lately, there has been a lot of chatter about negative SEO. But what is it really? Does it happen? And is it something to be worried about? If so, how can you protect yourself? This article will shed some light on this topic and hopefully overcome fear that exists.
When someone deliberately attempts to lower the search engine rankings of a particular website, it is known as negative SEO. Although there are many more techniques in which this can happen, link based negative SEO is the most common. However, according to leading search engines such as Google, effective negative SEO is quite rare because there are many ways that search engine algorithms can prevent it from occurring. For example, Google makes sure competitors don’t harm your site with bad links, their algorithms are able to determine whether it or not the links are self made, you have the option of ‘disavow’-ing any links that look spammy, and lastly, there is always the opportunity to report harmful situations to Google. Many SEO Company in Ahmedabad do negative SEO.
Most often, something that is suspected to be negative SEO is not really negative SEO. Let us discuss a few examples of situations that should not be regarded as negative SEO. Firstly, just because you think a link looks weird that does not mean it is harmful. Also, site owners should be careful not to mistake all site wide links as bad links. Furthermore, sometimes meaningful friends are actually trying to help you out by building links for you and you mistake them for competitors trying to bring you down. Although this may sound funny, it does really happen! Moving on, just because you have been hacked, you cannot report negative SEO taking place. Carefully observe what the hacker is trying to do first before jumping to conclusions.
On the other hand, let’s discuss a few examples of situations that could be negative SEO. A1 Infosoft is one of the best SEO Comapany in Ahmedabad. Links from foreign forums are a high possibility of negative SEO. A sudden influx of links from TLDs such as .ae, .au, .ru, .cz, .cn, .biz, and so on is a sign of an attack. Also, sometimes completely irrelevant blog posts send in a large number of links to your site, which can be harmful. More suspects are several amounts of keyword-anchored links coming in from multiple sources, and links from bad sites such as gambling sites and porn sites.
It is necessary to emphasize that most sites do not need to be worried about negative SEO because of the many efforts taken by search engine algorithms to prevent it from happening. Yet, sites that could possibly be affected are those that are highly competitive (insurance, casinos, pharmacies, etc) and those that have are known for doing their own manipulative linking .
In these cases, the best thing to do to protect yourself is to regularly monitor your backlinks. This should be done frequently enough so as to clean up unnatural links. Sites that are low at risk from negative SEO also benefit from monthly audits of backlinks. By doing this, you can observe the new links that are good for your site and those that are bad. Although algorithms can do this too, doing it manually ensures 100% accuracy.
