Negative SEO and Businesses
Most companies tend to have a small risk of facing negative SEO, however, it’s always possible for competitors to negatively impact the ranking of a website in search engine results pages. Fortunately, companies can get ahead of it, and protect their ranking with a few different strategies. However, before a company can start working on offsetting any negative SEO, it’s important to know what that is first.
Negative SEO
The set of strategies that others can do to decrease the ranking of the website of a competitor in search engine results pages is what negative SEO entails. Most of the time, those strategies tend to happen outside the company’s business website, such as generating more backlinks that don’t contribute to the quality of backlinks that the company has already generated, or really sharing the content from that website. However, there are times when they also involve changing the content of that website by hacking it. The goal of search engine optimization efforts is for companies to improve their ranking on search engine results pages and increase the authority of their domain. There are a few different ways that companies can go about doing that, including creating high-quality content, utilizing targeted keywords, and building high-quality backlinks. When done right, the company’s website will increase its rank on search engine results pages, generate more organic traffic and conversions, and improve its brand recognition. However, negative SEO is the opposite of all of this. There is a set of strategies that can hurt the ranking, brand reputation, and authority of a website and its domain. Many times, when these strategies are utilized, they are being used by a market competitor. However, companies need to know that there are some service providers that can implement such strategies for a fee on behalf of others as well.
The most popular search engine in the world these days is Google, which means the ranking of a website on Google’s search results is incredibly important for many companies. While the company does a lot of work behind the scenes to improve its algorithm, it’s not able to precisely state which changes are being made to that algorithm with every update because bad actors can figure out different ways to take advantage of those changes immediately. Back in 2012, Google released a new update to its algorithm and began punishing websites that utilized negative SEO strategies in a stronger way, which meant that websites can no longer rely by using low quality backlinks. However, with that update, many businesses found that they could purchase low quality backlinks for the websites of their competitors, and get Google to punish those websites, which meant that those types of attacks are happening more frequently. These days, although it’s not as common, there are times when they do happen, and sometimes, they can even happen by accident. It’s important for companies to figure out the precise reason why their website ranking is low on search engine results pages before they can blame negative SEO for their ranking, however, companies need to know what that is before deciding whether it’s a ranking factor for their website.
