Negative SEO Attacks Are Real! Simple Ways To Protect Your Website

FullColor_1280x1024_300dpi
Maps Of Arabia
  • Date Published
  • Categories Blog, Guide
  • Reading Time 6-Minute Read

SEO and Digital marketing, in general, is about learning the internet, and then use it to make brands popular, famous, discoverable…

What is negative SEO? and how to secure your SEO gains?

SEO and Digital Marketing, in general, is about using the Internet to make brands popular, famous, and discoverable. Negative SEO, on the other hand, reverses the process to get the opposite effect.

In this article, we will cover the most common practices and tips to protect your website. But there is no definitive way to fully secure your SEO. In search, there are no guarantees, even big G cannot control good SEO or negative SEO and Webspam. However, they are getting better year after year, and so are we.

Before getting to Negative SEO, be aware that in most cases of ranking drops or other SEO issues, the cause is usually self-inflicted. In the process of optimizing something that is actually working, webmasters can change settings that back-fire! Not a negative SEO attack, or a Google penalty or any other outside actions. Check all on-site, redirections, server-side, Google Search Console security issues, and activity log before investigating negative SEO.

Installing an SSL Certificate – HTTPS

Most hosting providers offer it for free, or for 5 USD max, and it’s astonishing how many websites are running on htttp:// versions, and they already installed the SSL security!

Installing an SSL certificate is a simple process, not more than 13 clicks! That will help from the SEO standpoint, that your webpages are secured for Google to recommend for more users and slightly up the ranking if the rest of your competition is not securing the content.

Also, from a user standpoint, it’s annoying to get the pop on your browser asking you if you trust the website you are about to visit. For first time visitors that would be a total turn off. Clicking back to search results will demolish your engagement rate and increase bounce time.

Just check which version your browser is using: http://www.domainname should be switched to httpS://www.domainname

Harmful links, spam back-links & other linky stuff

Links used to be as harmful as they were powerful. Back in the day, it was easier to hack a website and place a link from their most authoritative page to your website. Fortunately, it’s getting harder to place links nowadays, but still, you need to check your source pages and run a test for external links regularly.

The most common links negative SEO practice is using a tool to build thousand of low-quality backlinks to your website, which will either get you a penalty or fill your backlink profile if on Google Search Console Link Report.

Fortunately,  Google is getting much better at detecting those links and ignoring them. They would probably have an equally positive effect if they were intended to boost your ranking and authority – yeah some SEOs still do that –  but it’s pointless.

However, if you detected such links polluting your link profile, you can always disavow low-quality links by using the Google Disavow Tool.

However, you should not help Google with their job, if it’s not counting the link positively, then it will ignore the links, don’t worry.

So when to use the disavow tool? In some cases, if the links are being built manually, with the intention of bringing negative SEO to your website, check your competitors. Who is winning or losing? A good SEO consultant can bring you more details than you could imagine.

Chris Bennet – a well-known SEO from Agency Hacker –  once shared a story. His father had a car wash station in Australia, their website and local SEO is their bread and butter, and they had some decent competition for 4 years.

Then the rankings began to drop, and their regular competitors too. A new player in town entered the market with a big budget for links and a sophisticated SEO agency, getting them links worth 100 USD per link, and buying links for their competitors– 1,000 links for 1 USD!

There Chris decided to negative SEO attack him in return. Long story short, Chris destroyed him. He brought him links from inappropriate websites and pushed relevancy by anchors related to Cars and Ladies which turned out to be a huge category with traffic from the inappropriate websites, which caused the spammer a manual penalty taking him out of the SERP completely.

Google Maps spam and negative SEO

Here are more gems if you are enjoying the read so far. Google My Business is a solution under development, a work in progress, with a different algorithm than organic search. More pieces to move, simpler strategies and practices, in short, there are so many flaws in the system.

Suggesting edits

A recent bug was solved recently where users were able to suggest the opening date of the location. If a date in the future was suggested and was approved by the Google Algorithm, it would disappear from Maps until the supposed launch date! That affected many businesses, and it’s a relief that it’s fixed.

Claiming ownership

This we came across last year, in 2019. We were looking for SEO Agencies, and we found two listings belonging to a well-known restaurant. One of them was verified and changed to an SEO agency Amman! Taking their reviews and changing some images but could not delete all, we reported the incident on Local Guides Connect and it received a hard suspension, here is the full story.

Image hijacking

It trended once in Ukraine, where SEO’s were playing with governmental listings on Google Maps, posting photos of hairless cats and dogs, and due to the engagement rate on those images, Google was featuring it as a cover photo since the listings aren’t verified.

Another way of doing it is posting inappropriate back images on a black background, users and bots view images differently which may trigger a penalty, so beware of blank images posted by users, and remove all immediately.

How to secure a website against negative SEO?

If you are a business owner, as an SEO expert for a consultation. If you suspect you might be a victim of negative SEO, fundamental security measures should be implemented by the developer or webmaster working on the website.

There are many tutorials on how to do the basics that actually work and protect you from the most common attacks, including some dangerous types like DOS attacks.

The problem with negative SEO is that even if it diagnosed and fixed, there is still someone trying to harm your business, and you need protection for future SEO rewards.

Lastly, negative SEO is a part of the game. We don’t mind taking down competitors if they spam their way up the rankings. In many cases, including negative SEO in your arsenal could be more helpful than on-site practices, if the affected person deserves it. It’s a case by case scenario, so consider this blog an educational resource to detect and prevent negative SEO against you.