Negative SEO From Links What Can You Do If Youre Hit?
In this post, we cover the basics of negative search engine optimization (SEO) and look at what you can do to fight negative SEO link spam. This being a hot topic in the industry, I encourage readers to comment at the end of the article.
First, lets take a moment to define negative SEO. Negative SEO is the act of performing some type of action that damages competitors organic search rankings.
There are many ways negative SEO can be done. Someone could hack a website and riddle the code with HTML hyperlinks or inject malware. Even making multiple duplicate copies of a website or stealing a websites content could result in decreased rankings for that site, which could be seen as a method of negative SEO. Anything that hurts a websites rankings, which is done intentionally, could fall into this category.
For the purposes of this article, we are simply referring to someone (usually a competitor or black hat SEO company) building low quality links which point at the website they are trying to get penalized.
The first step in discovering if you are the target of negative SEO from links is reviewing your backlink profile. In most cases, it is a good idea to do this once a week or once a month, depending on how concerned you are and how cutthroat and competitive your industry is.
You can view the links to your site report in Google Webmaster Tools to get a decent high-level view of the links Google is seeing and utilizing as authority indicators when reviewing your site.
There are also other excellent tools out there, such as Majestic SEO, Opensite Explorer and Ahrefs, that can often surface additional inbound links not listed in the Google Webmaster Tools report. We do know that you can get a manual action for links not listed in Webmaster Tools, so its a good idea to get as much information as possible.
When you review these links, keep an eye out for the following:
Outside of just looking at the links, it is also a good idea to occasionally check to see if you have a manual action.
Originally posted here:
Negative SEO From Links What Can You Do If Youre Hit?