Negative SEO and Its Types: A-Z Guide On Black Hat SEO

Negative SEO and Its Types: A-Z Guide On Black Hat SEO.v We all know of black hat SEO techniques and the offensive impact it has on website rankings on search engines. If you own an SEO agency, you must be aware of the manual penalty inflicted by Google if it finds you revel in these black hat SEO practices. because of this, online businesses are running away from black hat SEO techniques and leaning more towards technical SEO practice and white hat SEO.

However, there are various new strategies used by competitors to bust your efforts and imperil your rankings. 

What is Negative SEO?

It is referred to the tactics and strategies aimed towards ruining the rankings of competitors and reducing their organic traffic.

Businesses intentionally execute black hat SEO techniques on their competitor’s websites to destroy their SEO efforts. 

Let us get know, how competitors do this and how to stay protected from these negative SEO attacks.

Types of Negative SEO

Negative SEO has developed over the years. It began with backlinks where site owners placed their competitor’s links to bad toxic websites. This resulted in spammy links, which could be resolved by adding them to the disclaim file. 

Nonetheless, in 2020, there are several ways for attackers to perform negative SEO. It is much extra serious in the current scenario and also difficult to detect.

Attackers do On-Page SEO as well as Off-Page SEO strategies to harm their competitors’ rankings and organic traffic on search engines. We have gathered a list of such negative SEO strategies to keep you notified and safe from such attacks.

Negative Off-Page SEO

This includes attackers adopting off-Page SEO techniques to impede the website’s rankings. They are mainly focused on creating bad backlinks that point to the website.

Link Farming

We all know about grey hat SEO practice. Let me give you a summary of link farms. Link farms are a collection of similar inter-connected sites. The sole objective of these websites is to provide hyperlinks to boost certain pages of your site. Website owners practiced link farms to increase their page rank and obtain good rankings in the Search Engine Result Page(SERP). In 2012, Google’s Penguin algorithm punished several websites. This was the end of link farming in the SEO world. 

Bad Reviews

This takes possessiveness to a whole new level. Competitors bend so low that they unite with people and organizations to write fake reviews about your business. This affects your website appearance on the Search Engine Result Page as it gives Google a wrong impression of your company. A bad 1-star Rating and Reviews also affect your local SEO rankings. This can get very serious. You can began to losing your customer’s trust. 

Scraping Content

This is a black hat SEO technique that includes copying your website content and posting the same on various websites. The results is duplicate content. In the earlier days, site owners used this technique to rank higher in the Search Engine Result Page and got away with it. Then came the Google Panda algorithm update which was pretty great at finding such duplicate content. Websites using this technique were severely penalised.

Pogo Sticking

It occurs when users click on a page in the Search Engine Result Page, don’t get what they are searching on search engine, and exit the page. This usually occurs when a user searches for a phrase in Google search engine and finds a page which does not related to his query. Google keeps track of this pogo-sticking. For Google, this means that the website is not give a correct result to display in the Search Engine Result Page. This results in loosening of the website’s ranking. 

Making changes in Content or Code

This requires some high-level hacking specialization. But in case you are a bitter opponent, competitors can go to an extreme extent. The attacker tries to find any security openings in your website backend and eventually use it to their benefit. That is the reason opting for a SSL HTTPS certificate is even more important. 

In the event that your security is compromised, the attacker can get admittance to your website code and content. They would then be able to alter the code so you will be shown a different rendition of the page while your users see a completely different page. This is risky for your website ranking. 

Always ensure that your backend programming, and every one of the classes and components used to assemble your site, are cutting-edge. Furthermore, make a content that takes a reinforcement of your website pages. If your site is attacked, it will be simpler to recuperate to the recently saved version. 

Perform SEO site reviews routinely and always update your security declarations. Buy a substantial SSL HTTPS declaration. This will ensure your site against programmers and furthermore give a lift in its positioning (HTTPS is a positioning variable). 

Intentional DDoS Attacks

DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack is a tactic where a huge volume of traffic is sent to your website by the attacker. This crashes the server and makes your website unusable. Users will make some shocking memories riding your web-pages. 

Attackers utilize these DDoS attacks to significantly expand the heap on your server. This hampers the users’ involvement in the UI. Many might even not be able to open your website. What’s more, most importantly, the Google spider can not crawl your web-pages. This affects your crawl budget and Google won’t crawl and record your pages. 

Routinely screen your site speed. Watch out for the Google Page Speed Insights metrics like FCP (First Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay) and Speed Index of your site’s significant pages. On the off chance that you notice your website pages dialing back with practically no progressions to code, right away check your server logs. The log records will assist you with deciding the specific wellspring of the additional heap coming on the server. When you know about the source, you can obstruct these crawlers in the robots.txt document. 

Delete your site entirely from Google

Sounds crazy, isn’t it? But this can happen to your website. A team part who has quit your organization and presently works for your competitors might do this. Sometimes such things occur assuming that an ex-representative still approaches the accounts. 

Ex-representatives (who are currently working for your competitors) may make changes to your hunt console and completely remove the website from Google’s file. He can likewise hinder every one of the spiders (counting the Google Bot) from crawling your pages.

Delete all of your ex-representative’s records before they leave the organization. Eliminate all authorizations and access too. This guarantees that the representative does not have control over any of your resources. 

If you discover that some altering has occurred, immediately go to your hunt control center and snap on the “Removals” tab.

Conclusion

There are different sorts of SEO techniques utilized to upgrade the site. Be that as it may, where there is acceptable, there is abhorrent. Negative SEO activities in the SEO business are shameful yet they do exist. This makes it even more important to consistently perform site reviews. 

Stick to a point by point SEO review checklist to really look at all your important on-page and off-page SEO components. This will guarantee that you know about any of your rivals negative SEO attacks. 

If you discover such attacks truly late, and Google has as of now forced a manual punishment, we advise you to contact a SEO agency that offers Google punishment recuperation administrations. This will assist you with recuperating your site rankings and search traffic. 

Tell us in the remarks if you have been a casualty to such regrettable SEO attacks and how you recuperated from them.