Tips to Protect Yourself from Negative SEO Attacks

Negative SEO has taken too many victims over the last few years, and even Google acknowledges that this significant cybersecurity threat is growing by the day.

Tips to Protect Yourself from Negative SEO

There are several techniques you could positively use to prevent negative SEO attacks, or detect them before it is too late.

1. Track Your Backlinks Carefully

You need to absolutely know when you gain or lose a backlink to your site. Spammers will often absolutely try to link your site using low-quality links. They may also come up with ways to delete some of your most important backlinks.

There have been some cases of spammer contacting the backlink hosts and asking them to completely delete particular links. Keep a very close eye on your backlink profile to identify any suspicious activities.

It is actually quite easy to monitor your backlinks. Use special tools like MonitorBacklinks, which can keep track of your backlinks. Many other tools are capable of send you alarms immediately a link is added or removed. Then, you can actually verify whether it is a legitimate action.

2. Monitor Your Keyword CTR Actively

Use the helpful Google analytics tools to actively monitor the click-through rate of your important keywords for any unusual activities, such as steep spikes. Oddly enough, this could be the cause of high bounce rates.

It is common for spammers to use bots to visit only one page of your site and leave almost immediately. To search engines, a high bounce rate is an indication of bad UX or irrelevant content that's represented using unrelated keywords. This ultimately lowers SERP ranking.

Engage with Google and begin actively disavowing misbehaving links if you suspect malicious traffic and false bounce rates.

3. Check Carefully for Duplicate Content

Attackers can quite easily produce copies of your web content by using scrappers, and publish it to hundreds of sites. It is a rather simple attempt at ruining a site’s ranking, but unfortunately, it can work really well.

Google might penalize you for having duplicate content. The main page may also loss ranking value.

Utilize plagiarism tools like Copyscape to carefully check whether someone has honestly published your content on other sites. If you manage to find duplicate content, you may file a cease and desist order with the hosting company, or a DMCA complaint with Google.

If enough evidence strongly supports your case, the copycat site could be temporarily shut down or de-listed.

4. Track Social Media Platforms

Spammers can sometimes create hundreds of fake personal and business profiles on forums and important social media platforms. It is crucial to actively monitor any mentions of your name, company, or website on social platforms to curb the growth of fake accounts.

There are several tools you could actively use to do this. Most of them are customizable to send emails or other interesting forms of alerts to inform you of any mentions. Follow up on the mentions to find the source, and if it fortunately leads to a fake profile, take appropriate action to see that it is deleted.

5. Observe the Site’s Speed and Performance

If your site’s performance and speed suddenly drop, you have to act fast to figure out the problem. Speed and user experience are key ranking factors. If the problem is heavy server loading, you might be a victim of forced crawling or a DDoS attack. Attackers can target particular functions of a website to slow it down. One way is using bots to send thousands of service requests every minute or flooding the network with heavy traffic to make resources unavailable.

Wrapping Up

Severe attacks could lead to crashes and downtime. Work with your web host to pinpoint such attacks and devise defensive systems.

Sites that have fallen victim to negative SEO find it difficult and expensive to recover. Sometimes the damage that’s done is just irreversible, and that's when it gets really tough.

Although Google is aware of the problem and is pretty good at isolating and reporting unusual ranking behaviour, it alone isn't nice enough. You roughly still have to take some caution to identify attacks before they become a problem.