SEO Academy offers several courses that will help you learn SEO and understand some of its techniques. You will also know how negative SEO affects your search engine optimization efforts.
What is Negative SEO
Negative search engine optimization is a technique used by one website to harm the organic search traffic of another site. The overall process involves linking a spammy site to a competitor’s site.
It happens to some websites and it could happen to you. For instance, if your closest competitors want to get your site penalized, they could perform negative SEO tricks.
Unfortunately, you cannot control this situation. And this is one of the things that eCommerce owners and webmasters fear. But it is not easy to detect.
Why People Would Carry Out Negative SEO Attack
There could be plenty of reasons why people would attack your site with this trick. Perhaps, they simply want to sabotage it or they just want to have fun.
Unintentional negative SEO attack can also happen. For example, one of your employees performs obsolete black hat practices not knowing that they could harm your site.
Should You Fear It
Before the release of Penguin 4.0 algorithm, negative SEO was a nightmare to some site owners. However, with the release of such an algorithm, your site is safe, as long as your site does not engage in wicked activities, such as keyword stuffing and unnatural linking.
Negative SEO is not just all about spammy links. Rather, it also involves fake reviews to Google My Business, Yelp, and many others that could cause damage to your site’s reputation.
Does It Affect Traffic
If you noticed a drop in your organic search traffic, you must not blame negative SEO. The reason for this is that there are plenty of causes your site’s organic search traffic is going down. And you will know all of those reasons when you enroll and learn SEO at SEO Academy.
Protecting Site from Negative SEO
To protect your site from such practice, you must first know whether your site has been attacked. You can do so by going to Google Webmaster Tools. It is also a good idea to set up an email alert so Google will notify you if your site has not received a manual penalty.
The trick here is to act quickly. But how are you going to resolve those spammy links if you could not control them?
Use the disavow tool. This tool is useful in telling Google that you do not trust the link and that Google must not include it into your ranking. Disavowing those links would mean avoiding your site from associating with those spammy websites.
You should also revise your SEO properties, perform random checks on your headers, alt tag, and other internal codes, and check out your robot.txt.
Negative SEO may harm your website. But with the updated algorithm, your site might be safe. If you wish to know more about how to protect your site from this negative SEO attack, learn SEO today by enrolling in our online courses. Reach out to our SEO Academy team through (877) 503-8231.
