With an increased understanding of SEO, increased success generally follows. And where there’s success, there’s always someone who’s trying to undermine it. In the world of the internet, that means bots. As your page starts ranking higher thanks to your superior understanding of linking and keyword usage, you will become more susceptible to a variety of bots looking to bring down your ranking.
First, we learn about Negative SEO:
What is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO refers to the exercise of the usage of black hat and unethical techniques to damage a competitor’s ratings in engines like Google. Negative SEO can take some of the extraordinary forms:
- Hacking your site.
- Building spammy backlinks to your site
- Copying your content material and allotting it all over the internet
- Pointing backlinks to your website using keywords like Viagra, poker online, and many others
- Creating fake social profiles and ruining your status online
- Removing the best backlinks your site has.
What is Bot in SEO?
Bots are programs made specifically to quickly gather data by searching through web pages. These programs aren’t always built with malicious intent. In fact, search engines regularly have bots gathering data to build their search index.
But, when a bot is built to take content, hack a site or spam a page, it can be detrimental to a SERP (search engine results page) ranking and therefore, detrimental to a businesses’ income.
3 ways bots affect your SEO ranking
- Scraping: The first type of bot we’ll discuss is something referred to as a “scrapper”. These bots crawl through search results for certain keywords, picking up portions of content and assimilating it to be put on a new page that the bot’s owner has created. By having your content replicated on a low-quality page, search engines not only relate your page to a poor ranking site, but it also believes that you’re publishing duplicate copy. Both of these raise flags with search engines that will drop your ranking.
- Spamming Spam bots infiltrate your comment section and engage with other users. This type of malicious “user” puts legitimate users at risk for downloading Spamware, viruses and other potentially dangerous content. The search engine’s job is to give its user the most closely related, clean content to their query. In this sense, your page would be docked because of the high potential for users to engage with dangerous links.
- Hacking “Hacked” is a phrase the internet is very familiar with, but being hacked doesn’t always mean that your site dramatically collapses. Hacking bots can be much less obvious, entering the malicious code in sections of your site that don’t show up on the front end but is made obvious to search engines. If this happens, your users will get an alert that your site has potentially dangerous content and warns them not to enter your site, diminishing your page views and eventually your SERP ranking.
How to Prevent Negative SEO Attacks
To protect against these types of attacks, it’s important to constantly review old and new content on your page.
Set up Google Webmaster Tools
Google can send you email alerts when:
Your site hacking
- New owners of site
- Your website is being attacked by malware
- Your pages are not indexed
- Your site has server connectivity problems
- You get a manual penalty from Google
Must Track of Your Backlinks Profile
This is an important step; you need to keep track of new backlink if attacker performs negative SEO against your website by Building low-quality backlinks and Redirect. You need to check backlinks pointing to your website time to time using Ahrefs.com, MonitorBacklinks.com.
What do when you find Someone Performs Negative SEO against Your Website?
To deal with this problem Google has released the Disavow Tool to help webmasters.
- Create a List of Low-quality Link to remove.
You can easily create a Disavow list using Ahrefs.com and MonitorBacklinks.com.
After creating a list Submit to the Google Disavow Tool.
Not just remove the bad link is important, protect the best link is also important
Always contact webmasters with your business Email Id. To ensure that he/she is work for your website.
You can easily track using MonitorBacklinks.com
Add tags to the backlinks, when backlink remove you will receive Notifications Email.
Track Duplicate Content
One of the oldest technique is the copy content and distribute on the internet, if most of the content are duplicate then Google will be penalized your website, and you will be loose your ranking and traffic.
To prevent check the content on internet using CopyScap,
Make a list of website and file DMCA against this Domains.
- Observer Your Social Media Mentions
Sometime spammer creates social media account with your website name, report this fake profile before people get to follow.
- Verifying Emails cross your Site
Another way to stop these hacks before they start is by verifying emails across your site. By keeping a clean email list, you’ll ensure your data hygiene and make sure you aren’t sending out valuable content to emails related to spam sites or malicious users.
Software such as XVerify’s real time email verification makes it easy to check your email list, offering a bulk upload option or the ability to insert their email verification software directly on your page with their API or JavaScript options. No matter your chosen method of staying on top of your email list, making sure you’re only sending out data to active, real users as well as regularly checking for spam commenters and hackers will ensure your hard-fought SERP rankings continue to rise.