Beware Of Negative SEO

beware-negative-seo

I’ve talked a lot about SEO throughout the 4+ years of this blog. One thing I’ve failed to shed light on is negative SEO. This will be a very short post on negative SEO but you can read more over at Moz.

What is negative SEO?

It’s an SEO campaign that is launched to HARM and not improve the rankings of website.

Who would do such a thing?

In most cases it’s a website and business owners looking to drop the search rankings of their competitors. They’re many business owners out there who will do whatever it takes to beat their competition. It’s unfortunate but it happens.

In other cases it could be an SEO company who doesn’t know what their doing or is operating on old SEO principles that Google now frowns upon.

How does it work?

The most common case of negative SEO I’ve seen deals with un-natural ways of link building. This would be adding a bunch of backlinks on low quality sites pointing to a website with the exact same anchor text. It’s the exact same issue one of our clients faced a couple of years ago when they hired what they thought was a trustworthy SEO company.

How to prevent it?

Last week I was doing some link building for a client when I noticed they had 29 00 new backlinks pointing to their site!!

ahrefs

Certainly wasn’t me. When I dug deeper I found all the new backlinks were spammy.

In short, there is no way to stop someone from building spammy backlinks. But there is a way to stop Google from connecting those backlinks to your site. You can use a backlink checker tool like Ahrefs to monitor your backlinks. Then you can use the Google disavow tool to disconnect these spammy backlinks and negative SEO campaign from your website.

By using Ahrefs you will be able to see the majority of backlinks pointing to your website. When you add your website to the dashboard, you can set up automated emails to be sent to your account whenever a new backlink is discovered. This is very helpful and a much easier way to monitor your backlinks.