How to Detect Negative SEO in Good Time and Salvage the Situation

If you have a business website, you may have heard of negative SEO cases in the recent past, but like many people, you probably do not believe that it is real or you think you are immune to it. Negative SEO is an attempt at lowering a site’s rankings on search engines. It can either be done on-page, where a site is hacked and its content modified, or more commonly, off-page. Although there have been very few cases of negative SEO, it is a very real threat that you should be aware of, and learn how to detect and take the appropriate actions in case you ever fall victim. It can greatly affect your search engine rankings, and if you do not know how to detect it in good time, the situation can get very ugly.

Negative off-page SEO

In this type of negative SEO, the site is not internally interfered with. One common form of negative off-page SEO is the use of link farms. This is where someone builds numerous spammy links to a competitor’s site. All search engine algorithms are set to penalize websites for spammy links, so this can cause your ranking to drop tremendously. You can use various programmes to monitor your link profile, and if you notice any unusual trends, you should look into them because this is a sign of negative SEO. Find out the source of the links, and if they are from link farms, you should disavow them.

Another form of negative off-page SEO is scraping content and posting it on several sites. Although highly unlikely, search engines may be unable to tell the original piece from duplicates, and this means that the content will not be considered in your ranking. There are numerous plagiarism tools that you can use to check whether your content has been copied to other sites. You can ask the webmaster to remove the piece but if they do not, you can report to the search engine. Sometimes, competitors can also overload your site and cause it to crash or become very slow. This can even cause your site to be de-ranked. Your hosting company should be able to determine the source of the overload and block the crawlers.

Negative on-page SEO

Here, your competitors hack into your site and modify things on it. This is not as common as off-page negative SEO. The attackers can modify your content or redirect your pages to another site. Performing regular site audits will help you notice any modifications in your site’s content or code. The worst thing an attacker can do is to get your site de-indexed by implementing some commands. Search engines will not rank your site at all. To detect this early, you should regularly check your ranking. There are many tools you can use for this.

Bottom Line
There are a number of things that can cause a sudden drop in your search engine ranking. If you notice a sudden drop in your site ranking, rule out the other common things like algorithm updates, penalties, and competition before deciding that it is negative SEO. By detecting negative SEO early and taking the appropriate actions using effective Indianapolis SEO methods, you can reverse the damage before the situation gets out of hand.