Negative SEO is using the black hat SEO tricks to bring down the competitors’ site on the search engine. Once the site tanks in the perpetrator site ranks high in the search results. Many website have suffered negative SEO and it is possible to damage a great deal if not completely destroy the site. The basic idea is to make the competitor site appear as spammer which will then be penalized and de-ranked or completely removed from the search pages.
There are some benign Negative SEO tactics such as posting negative comments in the guest forums. Then the assault is increased and along with negative comments and malicious spamming backlinks. The links are increased gradually. Now when the search engine indexes the page, it finds spamming links which results in penalizing by the search engine. The more sophisticated technique involves tricking the search engine webcrawler with the DOS attack. The site is choked with errors, once the errors increase the limit of 500. the Googlebot will remove the page from index.
Following are few steps which could help you cope with negative seo: Turn on the Google Webmaster Tool Alert (GWT). This is the first line of defense. It will let you know if about spamming and also tell you if Googlebot can’t access your site. Turn on GWT by going to Webmaster Tools Preferences and turn on notification for all issues.
Then you should constantly monitor your backlinks through software such as Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, Link Research Tools, or Google Webmaster Tools. Third, you should remove and disavow the malicious, spammy backlinks. You can request removal or write in disavow.txt. You can request Google about spammy backlinks. If you are sure who the culprit is then speak up.
Talk to them and if they don’t seem to care than speak to the world and tell about their nefarious activity. The last step is the most important one. Improve your content. Create powerful, attractive, interesting and genuine content to fight back the spam attack. Hope with these defensive techniques you will win the battle against the negative SEO preparatory.
