Important SEO Information

How to Protect Your Business Website from Negative SEO

 

In the old days of SEO, there were two categories of SEO techniques, they were called “White Hat” and “Black Hat” White hat (taken from the idea that the good guy always wears white) techniques were always above-board methods to improve a website’s search ranking and not violate search engine policies or guidelines. Black Hats were known for using questionable methods to achieve optimization most of which violated or poorly looked upon by search engines like Google. In most cases, black hat techniques did work until the site was caught and then penalized, which would hurt rankings in the long run.


What is Negative SEO?


The days of white and black hats are over and the new game in town is called negative SEO. The concept is simple, implement techniques know to hurt search engine ranking and apply them to your competitor’s website. The main technique is to create malicious backlinks to your site that connects your site to bad links from sites that have been de-index by Google or create links that go to pages that do not exist within your site thus creating broken links. Both techniques will potentially cause your ranking harm especially from Google. Other techniques include: linking low-quality sites to your website from sites that violate Google's quality guidelines through spammy, unrelated links. Copying and pasting your content, and publishing it on multiple sites all over the internet to get Google to penalize your site. Other methods include click fraud, posting negative reviews online to hurt your reputation, and installing malware or programs to slow down the indexing of your website.
These techniques generally work because most companies do not monitor their websites or understand what to look for, thus the practice is gaining and most companies are unaware of it happening.

What Can You Do?


The first thing you need to do is run a backlink audit of your site and monitor for “Toxic” links on a monthly basis. Programs like SEM RUSH and WEBCEO offer paid programs which are essential for large companies with large websites. There is also a free program which is great for small companies or for those who need to start now (https://linkgraph.io/free-backlink-analysis/). When you identify these “toxic” links they cannot be removed but instead need to be “disavowed” by Google.


The Link Disavow Process?


To communicate to Google which links need to be removed from your link profile and thus eliminate the threat created, you need to follow a disavow process.


  • First identify the toxic links, you can verify them using a program suggested above and further check to see if the toxic links have unrelated anchor text in the link or point to pages that don’t exist or come from sites with weird subdomains. (Note serious attackers tend to use similar subdirectory names)

  • Create a disavow list in Notepad using the following format for each link.

 

# example.com removed most links, but missed these

https://spam.example.com/stuff/comments.html

https://spam.example.com/stuff/paid-links.html

# Contacted owner of shadyseo.com on 7/1/2012 to  

# ask for link removal but got no response  

Domain:shadyseo.com

 
  • Upload this file to the Google Search Console Disavow Links Page
  • (Set up a Google Search Console account if you don’t already have one.)
  • Upload the file and click submit.
  • You Are Done.

 

You need to go back after 2 weeks and check to see if Google has disavowed the links.

NOTE: Save the file, you create to add additional toxic links, this is an additive process, if you upload a new list without the old list it will update and release the links you had disavowed.


Neal Rabogliatti, President, DMS Search Engine Optimization