How To Spot and Fight Negative SEO
In the world of the web, there are many things a website owner can't directly control. While there are many methods you can employ to improve the rankings of your website, you are ultimately at the mercy of Google's algorithms. As if constant Google changes weren't enough, there's also a damaging and growing trend in the black-hat SEO world. Believe it or not, some competitors are sabotaging their competition through the practice of negative SEO.
What is Negative SEO?
In essence, negative SEO is a reverse-engineering process to get a site knocked off the search engines. Many SEO campaigns focus on link building, and negative SEO is no different. However, with negative SEO, the goal is to build as many bad back links as possible. These back links can range from spammy directories to blog comments to pornographic websites. No matter the source, these are links that go directly against Google's Webmaster guidelines.
With negative SEO, a person is actively trying to get your site penalized by utilizing the link building processes that Google targets with algorithms like Penguin. Unfortunately, Google doesn't look at who built the back links. The search engine's only concern is whether or not they exist. If your site has tons of spammy backlinks, then you can get penalized whether you put them there or not.
Besides linking there are other methods to impact a site via negative SEO like the items below:
1. Hacking your website
With access to your website people can do a variety of things but some common techniques are installing malicious software which obviously search engines frown upon. They can also simply modify your robots.txt to block search engines from crawling your website. This is a thorough and quick way to get your site removed from a search engines index.
2. Bad Badlink Building
I'm sure we all know the value of links to your website but there's also bad links and competitors know this so their strategy is to get links from poor quality sites to link to your website. The best way to keep an eye on this is through Google Webmaster tools. If you look under Search Traffic >> Links To Your Website you can keep an eye on trends.
Also there 3rd party vendors such as Open Site Explorer that can give you a graph view to keep an eye on your link profile.They have a feature that lets you check your "Just Discovered Links" which you can track and actually verify the anchor text used as well as the quality of the website.
3. Spam Report
Google has a feature to report a website as spam. A competitor can easily report your site as spam and even ask a few friends to do it over a certain period of time. If your site is reported enough it's likely that Google will take a look. The last thing you want to do is be on Google's radar, especially with such uncertainty about what they consider white-hat and black-hat SEO these days.
How to Stop Negative SEO
Unfortunately, there is no guaranteed way to prevent negative SEO from happening. As I've mentioned above, there are ways to stay on top of the game so you can catch it before it's too late. The most important way to stop negative SEO is to closely monitor your backlink profile. By running backlink checks frequently, you can watch for any new link activity that seems suspicious. If you see any links that you don't think should be there or that don't seem relevant to your website, you can immediately contact those webmasters and ask for the links to be removed. If they don't respond, you can always use Google's disavow tool.
If you're not familiar with disavowing links, you'd be best served reading my article on how to use Google's disavow tool.