Understanding Negative SEO

Understanding reseller SEO and negative SEO is important when it comes to managing your website and obtaining the best results possible in the search engines. Google’s recent Penguin update has re-ignited the hysteria that seemingly surrounds any update and what it may mean for negative SEO practices. While negative SEO does exist, and there are certain do’s and don’ts when it comes to SEO, the “negative SEO” term in general is overhyped and causes much unnecessary worry and stress for webmasters and internet marketers.

What is Negative SEO?

Negative SEO is defined as when anybody does something malicious to your website in an effort to reduce your website’s rankings in the search engines. The definition has become even narrow after the recent Google Penguin update which has basically realigned the definition to mean any action taken by a third party that makes your link profile look bad.

This means a third party, whether it’s a person or group of people have launched an attack where they send numerous low quality backlinks to your website. They can also send backlinks to your website that were originated using black hat methods. Black hat methods include using automated software to generate backlinks, using paid back linking that give spam backlinks, and more. Negative SEO is different from website attacks such as SQL injection or DDoS attacks. These attacks are designed to temporarily take a website offline or modify the database in some way. Whereas negative SEO methods are focused on lowering the website’s results in the search rankings for the benefit of its competition.

Signs of Negative SEO Attack

Detecting a negative SEO attack before it causes serious damage to your rankings is very important when it comes to keeping your site ranked well and profitable. Below are the two primary ways in which you can detect an impending or current negative SEO campaign against your website:

Unexpected drop in traffic – One of the easiest ways to tell if you are being the target of a negative SEO campaign is if you notice an unexpected drop in daily traffic over the course of a week or more. Remember that daily drops and rises are considered perfectly normal, so a negative SEO attack should only be considered a possibility when the drops persist and sustain for more than 7 days.Considerably more “low quality links” – If you use a service such as Google Webmasters you can peek into your site’s inner workings and see all of the incoming backlinks to your website. If you suddenly notice an increase in so-called low quality links coming to your website it could be the result of negative link building against your website. Another factor will be that these links are all coming from the same root domain. This is a direct effort by malicious webmasters to devalue your existing links and lower your website in the search ratings.

Recognizing when you are the victim of a negative SEO attack is important so you can take preemptive action before the damage gets too great.

Can these Attacks be Prevented?

Now that you understand the possible damage these types of attacks can cause, you’re probably interested in wondering how you can take action and protect your website from being the victim of such attack. While there are ways to establish a “fence” around your website and block incoming rank-slashing attacks, this is often expensive and involves purchasing extremely expensive hosting which involve using multiple types of databases and server configurations.

An easier way to prevent negative SEO attacks is to ensure that your link profile is authoritative in nature and includes numerous backlinks that originate from a wide variety of sources. This will ensure that in the event of a negative SEO attack your website will be able to pass the Google algorithms that determine where the website ranks in the search engines.

Understanding how SEO works and incorporating every facet of SEO into your overall campaign is also important when it comes to preventing the damage that typically results from a negative SEO attack. Make sure you incorporate good on-page SEO on all of your webpages, and you use a variety of SEO methods for promoting your website to avoid damage.