Love it or hate it, search engine optimization is what allows your web content to be relevant. When your SEO strategy is working, your content shows up in the SERPs and people click on it. But, what happens if you are the victim of an SEO attack? It can be hard to bounce back from these attacks, but it’s not game over. The important thing is that you know about the attack and can act accordingly.
Let’s go over what a negative SEO attack entails and how to handle the situation.
What are SEO Attacks?
An SEO attack is when a competitor uses “dirty SEO practices” or “black hat SEO tactics” to surpass your placement in the rankings. Google is much more sophisticated at detecting this mayhem, but that doesn’t mean that things don’t happen. If these websites succeed at negative SEO, they’ll push your site down in the rankings and send traffic to their site instead.
Some of the most common forms of SEO attacks are:
- Building spammy links against your domain
- Generating negative reviews
- Creating fake profiles or social signals
- Scraping and redistributing your content
- Getting your site de-indexed
Will I Know if My Site Has Been Hacked?
As long as your site is regularly maintained, you will know if it has been hit with negative SEO. Web monitoring identifies formatting and coding issues, spammy links, fake reviews and outright hacks. Also, review your analytics reports to look for things like:
- Huge drop in traffic
- Unusually slow page load times
- Sudden drop in search engine rankings
- Sharp decrease in clickthrough rate
- Sharp increase in bounce rates
- Excess negative reviews on Google My Business
- Copycat content
How to Handle a Negative SEO Attack
Negative SEO attacks are a possibility, but the good news is that they don’t happen often. Still, it’s important to be aware so that you can respond immediately.
If you do discover that you are the victim of a negative SEO attack, use Google’s disavow tool. It basically tells Google that you don’t trust the link and they shouldn’t factor it into your rankings. You can learn more about using this tool here. It may take some time before Google can determine your innocence, so be patient.
Knowing that things like negative SEO attacks are real, how well is your site being monitored? Creativity is key! To discuss your needs for a website monitoring company, contact Magna Technology today.
