If you’ve been in the business long enough, you’ll be able to experience a lot of dark things that can ruin your life.
Like we said on our previous post, you will never run out of enemies in this field. That being said you might want to stop and realize that not all your enemies will fight you head on in a legal sort of way.
Negative SEO is a malicious type of attack on your site in an (quite frankly a pathetic and desperate) attempt to harm your rankings or your performance online altogether. Trust me, we’ve experienced these petty attacks in the past as well. But you may be wondering, gosh darn it AJ! How’d you guys survive this long with all them Negative SEO attacks??
Sit down by the fire place because I’m about to impart forbidden kung-fu techniques in SEO: How to fend off a Negative SEO Attack.
A very important myth busting moment here: It isn’t always a direct competitor that uses negative SEO against you. There are actually more instances where individuals with vendetta against you (whoever it is or whoever they are, we’re out of it okay. We’re jsut here to impart knowledge. ) So keep your relationships clean and cool. Don’t make enemies. Specially in business.
Your fellow businessmen can have the budget to perform Negative SEO or hire people that can do that for them. So again, be very careful.
Now you might be wondering, heck, I should just hire people that perform Negative SEO so I can win against my competitors. If so, you haven’t been reading on any of our blogs lately. Also you’re a bad man and there’s no place for you here. You black hat meanie.
But if you’re wondering how often Negative SEO happens? Well, good news. Google through the years has actually made it really hard for black hatters to perform negative SEO. Not only does these things require vast amounts of money and time, it also takes so much work to do. So your best hope is that people can get too lazy to even perform this damned black magic of cheating.
So your performance and ranking are dropping, are you being attacked? If you’re already sure that you’ve already checked if you’re not just being penalized, it’s the right time that you start thinking about other worldly stuff like this Negative SEO Voodoo.
Identify If You’ve Been Hacked
Check if your site has disappeared from search results. Yes – sounds like a penalization. And frankly, it could be. But because of Negative SEO.
One of the most notable things about this is the creation and linking of spammy or dangerous kinds of links. And if Google see’s that you’ve suddenly acquired vast amounts of links of porn for example, your entire website will be completely erased from existence.
So once these things start happening start checking THOROUGHLY all your backlinks. Are they still the ones you made? Are they still related to your content and niche? Check everything. If you want to use tools, go ahead, man. Negative SEO isn’t a joke.
Another good place to look is the good old best friend of SEO’s, the Google Search Console. If you have a site connected here you can for sure get notifications of either malware or suspicious gambling spam links that came out of nowhere.
Next step is collect all that negative back links. Put it on a notepad file and go disavow them. This helps you take out these perceived bad links and disconnect them from your site. Watch out however, before you start passing this file to Google for disavowal, make sure that these links are actually harmful. A giant cut in backlinks through disavowal actually creates dangerous ranking and performance issues.
Now that you’ve cleansed your website of impurities and evil spirits in the form of gambling spam links and links to male enhancement medications, it’s time for you to rebuild.
That’s the life of an SEO. You build something and work really hard on it, only to be stepped on by others and their Black Hat antics. But then that’s the thing. You can always start again and keep improving.
Rebuild Your Link Profile
Unfortunately if you get bad links and bad reviews even, that’s there for ever. You can disavow bad back links, but then your total back links shrink. To combat this, you need to constantly create content. Yes, kids. Here we go again. Constantly updating your website’s activity through the use and creation of content is the number one thing you should do. No matter what dimension you’re in, if you don’t have that sauce, you won’t be tasty. What a terrible analogy. So instead to, heighten your fighting spirit after a completely demoralizing defeat because of Negative SEO keep this Five Finger Death Punch Lyric in mind:
“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight
Its the size of the fight in the dog”
This covers two things in my opinion.
Your site can have a really simple design. But if it has great content that’s always relevant, it’ll win at some point.
And if you’re an SEO who built your site from dirt up only to be kicked down by black hatters, you’ll only lose if you give up trying.
Lastly, you need to submit a reconsideration request to Google. This one will definitely take time. This request however is very important. This is your chance to directly talk to the Gods and explain your case. Once you’ve cleaned up your links, made your site more secure, Google will see it so don’t be afraid to communicate directly to Google when doing this.
And there you have it! You survived being kicked on the mud by negative SEO’s. One last thing you should be doing is keep learning and keep in touch with all the SEO advancements out there. Like (insane plugging here) making sure to tune in with our daily blogging!