Recognizing and identifying black hat tactics through Negative SEO Attacks has been a priority by specialists. Negative SEO just around lurking in the shadows ready to sabotage your website and penalize your ranking. The question is, can you prevent negative SEO Attacks on your website before it is too late? The answer is yes; you can always do something about it – through the right SEO services in Singapore.
Identifying Negative SEO
Negative SEO makes use of black hat tactics that unethically sabotage a website’s ranking in search engines. Some of the most common practices include:
- Duplicating content of your websites
- Generating fake social profiles bent on damaging your reputation
- Disconnecting the best backlinks of your website
- Website hacking
- Creating spammy links to your website.
However, with enough hard work and preventive tactics, you can prevent these attacks from causing irreversible harm to your website.
Below are tips on how to prevent negative SEO from damaging your website.
Stop Content Duplication
Content duplication is when you get valuable content from a leading website and publish it as your own. It should be noted that most of these recycled contents are being used as marketing come-ons by underperforming websites. However, the damage is done when these contents are taken from authoritative and noteworthy websites. The consequence of these duplication practices often results in losing ranking or value as a website of knowledge and authority.
There are tools to prevent duplication from ever occurring. Most used by SEO services in Singapore is Copyscape. The website quickly searches for content on the web that may identically match your blog or topic. There are two ways to deal with bringing down the duplicate article. The first is to ask the webmaster to put down the contents of the replicated copies of your original articles. The second is to report the act of plagiarism to Google Copyright. Just fill-up the form and wait for Google to act on it.
Vigilantly Track Your Backlink Profile
Negative SEO attacks occur when hackers build low-quality links or redirects to your website. Some of the easiest tools to use to check if someone is building links to your website are AHREF, Moz, or Open Site Explorer.
If you notice something amiss with the performance of your website such as a sudden fluctuation (increase or decrease), and there are currently no campaigns running, that should be a sign that there may be an attack happening.
What you should do is reject the attacking domain in order to recover your traffic and ranking. This is why it is important that SEO specialists should be able to do regular link audits on your website: to help detect if you are being targeted by negative SEO attacks.
Protection from Hackers and Malware
It is advised that you secure your website using plug-ins like Google Authenticator Plugin that work to protect password acquisition from hackers and malware. The last thing that you would want is for your website to be spammed without you knowing about it. Here are some tips on how to strengthen your protection from hackers and malware:
- Make your password strong by including numbers and special characters in it.
- Make sure you regularly back up your files and database.
- Make sure your hosting company can provide you an antivirus installation in order to protect uploaded files from being corrupted by malware.
Weed Out Fake Profiles
When your website becomes an authority, you invite many shady characters pretending to be you through social media in order to get traction and followers or derail your own. It is important that you become proactive and report these fake profiles as spam as soon as possible to the social media platform concerned before they gain momentum, and get more of your followers or new ones who aren’t aware of these profile atrocities.
Don’t Get Caught on Track with Your Own SEO Strategies
Maybe the attack is coming from within your own strategies. There may be some tactics in your strategies that hurt your rankings. For example, you might be using tactics that are not allowed by Google. You must remember that you must not link to penalized websites and that you should avoid buying links from blog networks for SEO purposes.
You must be selective with your posts, and make sure you don’t publish guest posts that are of poor quality. Make sure that majority of your keywords contain words specific to your website and not keywords that build too many backlinks. Lastly, don’t make enemies online.