You have surely heard about SEO if you are into the field of the Web. But, have you heard about Negative SEO? It is a practice of using black hat and unethical techniques to disrupt the ranking of a competitor in SERPs. This can be done by either hacking the particular website or building thousands of spammy links to the site. However, bad links cannot harm a site as much as one thinks it can, because Google constantly works to ensure that this does not happen. But, Google also confirms that its filtering methods are not 100% fool proof. So, we however need to take care of it ourselves too. But what can you do? Here are a few tips that will help you prevent your website from Negative SEO.
Avoid enmity
If you have enmity with your competitors or customers or anybody else in the industry, it is possible that they can set up various Negative SEO plans against your business so that you don’t get a good ranking. Never give a reason to anyone to take revenge on you. However, you must be ready with protection against any kind of Negative SEO attacks before hand, if in case any such situation arises. You can hire SEO experts in Bangalore who can help in implementing the necessary strategies to overcome any Negative SEO and improve your website’s rank.
Get rid of duplicate content
Get rid of any and every kind of duplicate content that you have on your site, even if it accounts for only 1% of the entire site. It is very important to maintain unique content as it is one of the key elements for SEO. Even if there is a slight duplicate content on your site, you may be penalized if found out by Google and thus, will lose rankings.
Have a secured website
Vulnerable websites are highly prone to spam, malware, hacking attacks and phishing as compared to secure websites. So, have a website that is secure, and make it a habit of maintaining regular backup of important data.
Keep a check on the SEO expert you are hiring
There are many SEO experts out there who sell link building packages, where you can get a whole bunch of directory listings. In such a case, it is possible that these same links are used to improve the ranking of other websites too! As a result of this, Google will automatically reject your backlinks. So, stay away from such packages and remember that a few good quality posts are much better than hundreds of low-quality guest posts. Also, don’t trade on website links without using the ‘nofollow’ attribute. Remember to use your website name for a majority of your anchor texts.
Keep a check on your backlinks
Make sure that you monitor your backlinks via a highly streamlined schedule on a regular basis. If you have lesser than 50 links, you can have a monthly check done manually. But, if the number of links exceeds 50, you can use automated tools like Ahrefs and Google Search Console to alert you.
Keep checking your social media mentions
There is a possibility that your competitors or anyone else creates a fake social media account of your brand and provides false information about you. Any wrong information may build hatred or negativity within the minds of the people. To avoid this, you must immediately report any such profile as spam before it grows too big. Obviously, it isn’t possible to get hold of all fake accounts across the whole wide Web, so you can use tools like Mention to help you find out the same.
