Types of Negative SEO Strategies And How To Mitigate Them
Whenever a company’s website suddenly starts getting significantly less website traffic, a decrease in the ranking for targeted keywords, warnings from Google, and even other websites start republishing the content from that website, businesses should know that someone is using negative SEO strategies against their website. There are a few different negative SEO strategies that have the potential to generate negative SEO on a website, but fortunately, companies have a few different ways to mitigate them and protect their websites.
Reviews
Companies can suddenly get an influx of negative reviews that can hurt their business and decrease their rankings on search engine results pages. Since reviews are relatively easy to change, they’re an easy strategy in terms of negative SEO. The best way for companies to stay safe from this strategy is to keep track of the reviews that are being left on the Google My Business listing of the company and report any reviews that seem fake.
Links
Many companies tend to invest a lot of time and effort into generating high-quality backlinks from authoritative platforms, which means a single low-quality link from a spam website won’t have an impact on the company’s website ranking on search engine results pages. However, since one isn’t enough, when it comes to negative SEO, there are groups of sites called link farms, that those bad actors can purchase to build links for a company’s website that are bad, and decrease the ranking of that website. Most of the websites in such farms are expired domains, which means they tend to have some sort of authority to give more weight to the low-quality backlinks. Google released an update to its search engine algorithm that made the operation of link farms relatively impossible to impact the ranking of other websites, however, that’s only in terms of companies that are looking to increase their rankings in a way that’s fast and easy, which results in a penalty from Google these days. Fortunately, companies that keep track of their backlinks should spot any link farms early enough, before they’re able to do any damage to their website’s ranking.
Scraping
Another negative SEO strategy is duplicate content, which means taking the content from one website, and publishing it, word for word, on other websites multiple times. Google has also released an update to its algorithm to ensure that companies can’t do this to increase the ranking on their websites, which means that if the search engine ends up finding the same content on multiple websites these days, only one of those websites ends up getting ranked in search engine results pages. Most of the time, the ranked website is the website that gets indexed by Google’s crawlers first, which means if a scraper immediately reuploads the content to another website and the crawlers index that other website first, the company’s website won’t be ranked for the same content. Fortunately, companies can use plagiarism tools to find whether their content is being used on other websites, and if any of the content shows up, it’s best to reach out to the webmaster and ask them to take it down or send a copyright infringement report to Google about the other website.
