Learn to deal with negative SEO techniques as there is no telling when your website could suffer third party sabotage
Negative/Reverse SEO, currently the most controversial topic in the SEO world is yet to find itself a worthy panacea (To learn about Negative SEO, you may refer to our previous blog entry). As promised in our last blog, we, at The WordsManShip came across a variety of solutions and identified a few that might possibly help your cause. These are not sure fire solutions since, to reiterate, a single effective measure is yet to be devised. So these steps are not our claim to countering the menace. Rather, these measures will help you shore up your website against any possible attempts on your site.
Now, we at the WMS rarely barter in technical aspects of running a website. It is a job best left to IT hacks and their fellow ilk. But we surely can partake in the exchange of ideas in the terms that quite a lot of us non-engineer website administrators (specifically the content writing and technical writing fraternity) can understand. After all, apart from writing content for the web, protecting the site is our job as well. Not to mention, it wrecks our efforts at SEO.
Without digressing any further, here are some possible tips against Negative SEO.
Identify Whether You’re Afflicted with Negative SEO
We mentioned this in our earlier entry as well. You have to constantly monitor your traffic and keep an eye out for sharp drop in traffic as well as SERP’s. Such an instance of a steep fall may indicate that your site may have been attacked by spam or manipulative link-building. You can employ the services of Ahrefs.com, Google alerts or Majestic SEO.
Ahrefs.com will help you monitor your site’s linking behaviour and the pattern of the anchor-text used. Google Alerts will help you filter your search and Majestic SEO will help you attain additional time based data about your website (Plus, data about the popularity your content service).
Brand Reinforcement and Authority Building
One of the criterion’s search engines use to assess the relevance of a site is the prominence the site and its content has on other popular website and blogs. Try to penetrate popular blogs by getting your brand mentioned and try acquiring a conspicuous presence in the site.
This will not only elevate your SERP’s but protect you from miscreants motivated with malice towards your site. This makes it imperative that your site raise its quality of content, which brings us to our next point.
Generate High-Quality Content
So that it attains high-end back-links and establishes you as a leading figure in your field
This is more of an advice than a specific strategy against Negative-SEO. Seriously, you need to heed this advice irrespective of whether you are under threat or not. Otherwise, no self-respecting hacker or competitor would even bother sabotaging you, (which makes it a strategy unto itself but rather we keep our eye on progress).
Having a robust content will additionally make sure that even if the page is spammed, it will not get devalued instantly. Take the example of creative writing. Unique topics and a creative approach gain instant popularity and there are no easy substitutes for this. Ergo, it’ll still stay at the North end of the search page. This will buy you enough time to pursue the following step.
Remove Affected Pages and Transfer the Content
Move the existing content in your link to a new URL and remove the affected pages lest it induce more harm to your SERP’s. You can employ Google’s webmaster tools to report the page or other tools like Removeem.com.
Using Google’s webmaster will help de-index the pages and remove any sort of connection the afflicted link will have with the site.
The real pain would be to reclaim the blogs and links that the page had amassed, but damage control is a part of the job isn’t it?
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