People are capable of doing really extreme things. Some of which can be really scary and unbelievable, while some are so odd it’s completely ridiculous. After finishing the whole Evil Genius series in one go the night before, it reminded me of the extreme lengths some of my older competitors did to try and bring down some of our campaigns.
One of the most common things I’ve encountered myself is when we get attacks from negative SEO efforts. Note, this is a topic that we’ve discussed here before. And the fact that businessmen will actually consciously decide to spend money and time on this baffles me. But at the same time, it’s an interesting thing to watch and observe.
Basically, negative SEO consists of trying to push your website towards a Google penalty. If you’re counted as one of the bad sites by Google, it’s technically really hard for you to recover. This then lets your competitors take you over easier. And in my opinion, since this to them is a golden ticket to pass you, means that they don’t know how to really perform search engine opimisation the proper way or they don’t have the time to learn these things. Which will be your advantage after you go through the hell of disavowing every single negative link they’ve cast upon you.
One aspect that’s a mystery to me as well is if there are actual agencies that offer negative SEO. For sure that can earn a lot of money since a lot of business owners that aren’t adept to all this online marketing mumbo-jumbo will definitely look for the quickest and easiest way to bring their competition down.
A scary thought is if there are individuals that can do all this damage all by themselves; like a former employee, perhaps?
Speaking of destroying things from the inside, Hacking is making a comeback, believe it or not. And this again points to some of the things I’ve just mentioned.
It is very important that you know who among your crew, posse, gang, whatever you call your team, have access to certain accounts. Because your former employees can be stolen by your competitors and can mess all your accounts from the inside. I’ve seen it first hand and I know it happens.
Also, what if that single ex-employee goes rogue and Jason Bourne hack’s your whole company (and all your accounts) all by himself? At the end of the day, It’s always better to secure everything.
A legit panic move by your competitors is if they try to destroy your reputation on social media. This, though a shallow thing can be as destructive as the previous items above.
Anyone of these tweets or Facebook reviews or posts has the potential to snowball into an online reputation nightmare. One of the extremely ridiculous things about this is that once something like that goes viral, it’s there on the internet forever. Unless, of course, the account it came from is taken out. But, there’s still a risk of it being copied and being seen and re-shared by other people.
A good combo of this is if all those negative reviews or posts about you or your company are made up of lies that’s designed to destroy your reputation.
Because the web is so advanced today, it’s also very easy to just make stuff up. Fake news and articles can be distributed so far and fast that you can go from being the king of the hill in the morning and be down the trenches in the afternoon with just one bad article about you.
Next thing you know, you’re the bad guy.
So the only way out of this is to continue to create content that’s relevant today and keep making updates so you can bury all those negative posts and links down the search results. If all those posts or articles about you or your company are false, the only way to clear you is to prove them wrong. Take testimonials from your customers and place them on your site to make it more trustworthy, do videos about your products and/or services, place them on YouTube so it becomes its own sharable content that can fight off all of those negative articles and posts etc.
In the end, it’s still actually very easy to fend off attacks like this. You just have to know how to react in these particular situations. If you’re already familiar with how things go by in the world of SEO, (which I know we all do) then these petty attempts to beat you will never work. Just remember that if the enemy is behaving like this and is attempting all these weird acts that you must be doing something right and you’re now a threat to their business.
