When spammers want to create negative SEO against your website, they need only to build low-quality links or redirects. Therefore, it is vital that you know when this is occurring. This is done through monitoring your link profile. There are various tools out there to accomplish this with reports sent directly to your inbox each day alerting you to any changes in your profile of backlinks. You’ll spend a good deal of time building a healthy backlink profile. You don’t want that to have been in vain.
Negative SEO: What is it?
There is a difference between practices that harm SEO and Negative SEO. When you are unaware of bad practices, then perhaps you haven’t properly optimized your header titles or landing pages for example, but negative SEO is deliberate. Because we understand to an extent what can improve SEO, we also know what can hard it. Spammers will purposely use what’s know at ‘black hat’ link building techniques to make you appear as if you’re trying to unfairly boost your own rankings. As you result, search engines like Google hit you with a link penalty, leaving long-term impacts on ranking and traffic. In other words, you’ve been framed!
The tactics used to generate Negative SEO can look like the following:
- Attacks targeted at your most valuable backlinks.
- Duplicating your content around the web.
- Creating public and private link networks pointing back to your page.
- Creating a large amount of low-quality or spam links.
- Creating fake social media accounts to weaken your reputation online.
- Linking to your site using suspicious and irrelevant anchor text.
Why Does Negative SEO Happen and How Can I Prevent It?
You might be wondering why spammers and other entities do this and create all this headache anyway. The easiest answer is that SEO value is almost as good as money when it comes to lead generation and conversions if you’re an e-commerce site. Even if you’re not in e-commerce, things like site traffic and page views might mean big business for you. Most spammers do it either for fun, for revenge, or to outrank the competition in search engines.
Monitoring your backlinks helps you avoid other spammers and other pitfalls that might befall you haphazardly. For example, here are some ways monitoring your link profile can prevent negative SEO:
- Identifies your best backlinks so you can actively protect them.
- Secures your website from malware and hackers.
- Provides insights as to which backlinks you should remove.
- Ensure the anchor text of your backlinks remains optimized.
Backlink Patrol to the Rescue
Backlink Patrol is gaining traction as one of the best backlink monitoring tools on the market. Simple and succinct, you’ll have all the options readily available for in-depth analysis or daily monitoring.
- Valuable analytics about your backlinks for understanding your status better.
- Multi-User support under the same account to work efficiently with your team.
- Moz data insights with Moz rank, domain authority, page authority, and other highlights.
- Check your landing pages and see which links point to them.
- Easy bulk CSV import for your backlinks within seconds, using one click.
- Notification system to update you about your backlinks.
- Multiple subscription options depending on your needs, with easy and secure payment.
- Follow / Nofollow, Anchor Text, Redirection and more options.
Once you have created your account, it will require you to add your domain and connect it with your Google Analytics account. From there we can help you with any questions you might have about the tool. Contact us to start protecting your backlink profile today from negative SEO today!