Are you looking to master SEO for the sake of your business?
The truth is that SEO is more than just keywords, tags, and content optimization. There are a lot of techniques and ranking factors that make up the brunt of what effective SEO really is. While it takes an expert to make successful SEO campaigns, you can still learn enough to affect the performance of your website.
One of the most important terms you need to familiarize yourself with in SEO is Negative SEO. This might sound something that’s a bit complex and odd but trust us, it can help improve your SEO efforts by a huge margin still.
What Is Negative SEO?
Negative SEO is also called as Black Hat SEO. It’s not something that you do on your end. Instead, it’s something that other websites do to your website to try and ruin your reputation from Google so that they can steal your precious search engine rankings on important keywords.
Back in the day, this was something that was done through the use of questionable banner ads that result in penalties for your website. However, today’s Negative SEO is more complex than ever and the techniques are a bit more subtle, to say the least.
Samples Of Negative SEO
- Duplicate Content – Spammers will copy and paste your content on their website and on other content farms. This makes your content obsolete and harder to find through organic search.
- Link Farming – This happens when others try to point low-quality links to your website. These links could come from spammy websites that create content for the sake of having them published.
- Website Crawling – Rankbrain and web performance are two crucial aspects of SEO. Website crawling basically forcefully slows down your website. It will get to a point where you’ll be penalized by Google for the slow performance.
- Content Modifying – Hackers will try to run invisible scripts to your website. They will try to change the header and footer templates which can affect the optimization of your content.
- Fake Social Media – This is the most common form of Negative SEO. Basically, spammers will try to create accounts for your website on Facebook and Twitter. They’ll then ruin your reputation by many means including posting low-quality content.
What Can You Do Against Negative SEO?
Directly, you can try to improve the security and privacy of your website so that it doesn’t get tampered with easily by hackers and spammers. You should also constantly check your content for any deadlinks or backlinks to content farms.
Google has an active battle against people who play against the rules when it comes to SEO. Negative SEO IS real but you will rarely hear people talk about cases like these that really affect their website. Still, it’s always worth looking into your website every once in a while for possible issues.
Negative SEO is basically foul play when it comes to websites. Staying vigilant against this type of SEO will prove to be beneficial for your website in the future so always bear this in mind.
