The world of Digital Marketing is also a place of competition, so bad strategies exist as in any other aspect of life. In the case of SEO, there is something known as Negative SEO, a technique that consists of applying strategies that penalize a competitor in Google results. But, what is negative SEO, and how to avoid it or fix it?

Knowing how Google works makes many people take advantage of this to, using their imagination, make them believe things that are not true.

Types of Negative SEO attacks

Many types of Negative SEO attacks exist and they focus on trying to do the opposite of what Google says to apply it to competitors, such as:

• Add thousands of links from low-quality websites to a competitor
• Hack a server to add malicious code that Google detects
• Pirate templates in which developers add links to casino websites
• Send thousands of poor quality visits to alter statistics
• Cause a drop in positions

Naturally, some sectors are more susceptible to receiving this type of attack, such as online jewelry stores, luxury cars, or IT. Above all, you have to be very careful with projects that grow a lot, that deal with sensitive issues, and that potentially generate a lot of income.

How to prevent a Negative SEO attack

One of the best strategies to prevent Negative SEO attacks is to monitor our website using different SEO tools.

This is complemented by being aware of our statistics, what Google Search Console tells us, and the objectives and alerts in Google Analytics. In addition to being as discreet and politically correct as possible.

In summary, we must:

• Review visits periodically
• Check links with SEO tools
• Check that the robots.txt does not change
• Add alerts in Google Analytics
• Monitor server crashes
• Use purchased templates and plugins and always have everything up to date
• Use a good hosting
• Know the market and what the competition does

How to detect a Negative SEO attack

Normally, when you suffer a Negative SEO attack you don’t find out until suddenly Google penalizes you or you simply start losing visits and you don’t know why. In many cases, it may be due to a change in the Google algorithm or something you have done yourself.

But sometimes, with an SEO tool, you can detect that thousands of web pages from other countries have added hundreds of junk links, that is, very poor quality links such as casinos, adult websites, or link farms, in short, you receive links that you shouldn’t get.

This practice that worked well in SEO years ago to improve authority, today is something very negative, so Google can penalize you automatically or even manually, even though you are not the one who is getting these links.

Therefore, it is important to add alerts in Google Analytics to monitor sudden changes in web traffic or measure if any of the objectives change suddenly.

We must be attentive to:

• Sudden drop-in visits
• Increase in low-quality links
• Descriptions without content in Google results
• Difficulty growing in a competitive industry
• Very slow web loading
• Constant server crashes
• Receive mass spam in comments

How to fix a Negative SEO attack

The best way to defend yourself against an attack of this type is to have good professional hosting to be protected and receive good support.

But also:

• If it is because of low-quality links: Send a disavow to Google to notify them of which links not to take into account
• If it is due to a change in the robots.txt file: Change the passwords and update it
• If it is due to a pirated template: Change the template and uninstall plugins that are not updated, install from scratch, and import content
• If it is due to a traffic attack: Talking to support or changing hosting

Want more help? Contact BMT Agency!

It is increasingly difficult to be penalized for a Negative SEO attack since Google usually detects this type of practice. However, we must always be vigilant and not think that it will never happen to us.

If you want professional help and support on the correct SEO performance of your website, contact BMT Agency and a group of experts will become your best ally in the digital world.