And will continue to point fingers at the latest threat to plague the SEO world. It was the same kind of paranoia that was being perpetuated when Google unveiled its Panda and the Penguin updates. While these can hardly be labelled as “threats”, they nonetheless were attributed as a prime cause of an abrupt decline in the web traffic as well as a fall in page rankings of many technical writing and content service websites. Negative SEO is all but a threat.
The Verdict Is Still Out
Of course, paranoia in most cases is unfounded. This does not mean we deny the phenomenon of Negative SEO. But we would like to point out that it is yet to turn into a rampant trend. We acknowledge its existence and recognize its results. But one has to remember that there could be various reasons which might have led to a certain fall in traffic or ranking. Simply assuming that you are afflicted by the dark side of SEO would be jumping the gun.
Besides, only the right diagnosis can lead to the appropriate remedy. Consider the situation that your rankings continue to languish in SERP purgatory while you cry foul over dark SEO tactics and sully your competitor’s name when in truth your SEO efforts have fallen inadequate. In this particular case, what good will changing URL’s and gaining authoritative link profiles ever yield you? So, Bottom-line; if you simply assume that you have been affected by Negative SEO, odds are that the problem is something different altogether.
Don’t Be So Quick To Blame Negative SEO
So can one dismiss the threat of Negative SEO for the while? Well, partly yes. Why, you may ask. The truth is that, SEO is a tough business and these tactics make it a notch tougher. It is a job for experienced and well trained hackers who too many a times seem to botch it up. True to how it’s generally understood, these tactics are rooted in an organized approach towards depreciating the value of your links and link profile and, in proportion with the popularity and success of the website; it will require an equally effective approach. Negative SEO can attack a website in the most formidable ways. Some are easy to detect, some not so much.
Look Inside For Mistakes Before You Look Outside For Malicious Intent
The most common Negative SEO tactic is to hit you with black-hat links across a myriad of domains. And your perpetrators would do it with a large bunch of links. As mentioned in earlier blogs, you can keep a track of it and remedy it with Google Webmaster Tools, Majestic SEO etc. I would lay emphasis on ‘large bunch’. A few bad links is just a waste of time. Besides, which website doesn’t have bad links?
If you do happen to come across any such squibs, you might want to check how many more exist in the domain as well as the next one. Odds are that you or your subordinates might be responsible for these snafus. There is also the fact to consider that this poses a temporary problem only. It is quite easy to rectify and the problem disappears soon.
Staying Prepared For Such Contingencies
It is possible to find the silhouette
It is advisable that you keep an organized record of the links and track them. This makes it easier to correct, especially if the error was committed by an outside third party firm or individual that you may have hired for supplementing your report writing and ghost writing service providers. This is a common peril when you buy content
It is imperative of course that you keep an eye out for security breaches that may modify content or add outbound content or block spider texts form accessing your page. Such problems are genuinely Negative-SEO.
Then again, if the SEO world has to fess up, Negative SEO is yet to assume a diabolical figure. It has still not evolved from its youngling roots. So the industry too has not been able to formulate appropriate measures against the menace. Till then websites can keep trying to shore up their defences but it is obvious that they still have very little to go by and are not yet fully aware of what they may have to battle against.
Some tricks hopefully will be of help. But it will be quite a while, when you come across a website that has encountered the nuisance of Negative SEO, it is after a rare and fledgling monster.
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