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10 Examples of Negative SEO to Watch Out For


Posted on by admin | in longhorn

Negative SEO has been in the forefront of tech news recently, with a number of different tactics being discussed. A looming question for many website owners is how to know whether they’ve been targeted for a negative SEO attack. There are some signs you can look for to determine if you are the victim of such tactics. The following are ten examples of negative SEO to keep an eye out for:

  1. Your website will have backlinks from spammy or low quality sites, usually in unusually high numbers and in a short period of time. This is a good indication that some effort is being made to deliberately associate your site with dodgy locations for the purpose of downgrading your website.
  2. You may find original content of yours is being posted, and indexed ahead of yours, on another website. That website was created with similar content to your own, for the purpose of getting your links ignored by search engines due to your having “duplicate” content on your website.
  3. 301 redirects to, or from, spammy websites are another attempt to associate your website with low quality, or even dangerous URLs. Spammers or competitors will create similar URLs to your own, and then redirect those links to you, which will adversely affect your ranking.
  4. Google has been alerting victims of negative SEO to the problem by sending out unnatural links emails via Webmaster Tools. This is Google’s way of saying that your website has benefited from link growth that the search engine sees as being outside of their guidelines.
  5. More difficult to detect, but a sure sign that your site has been chosen for a negative SEO campaign is the presence of fake tweets, blog posts or likes from Facebook.
  6. Link building that uses the same anchor text in high numbers and in a short span especially, should raise a red flag for you because it almost certainly will with Google, which of course is the intent.
  7. DoS, or Denial of Service, attacks are attacks on your website intended to overload your website with queries by using bots that can hit your site from multiple IP addresses. This takes an organized, concerted effort and as such is not frequently used for any but the most high-profile and high-ranking sites.
  8. Google Bowling is really just a reverse engineering of Google’s own guidelines, which penalize websites for purchasing link ads across their websites. So, as the logic goes in black hat SEO tactics, if it can get me in trouble for doing it to my site, it will get my competitor in trouble if I do it to his instead.
  9. Bogus copyright infringement complaints obligate search engines to remove the alleged offender’s page(s) from the rankings temporarily. If your site has been targeted unfairly, it’s then up to you to provide proof that the allegations are false.
  10. Spamming by proxy can get another website busted too. If an attacker decides to use your URLs to spam other sites, the fallout will be on you, which is difficult to defend against. The best defense against negative SEO is to build quality natural links and network with reputable sites in order to establish a strong reputation. This will greatly reduce your vulnerability.
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