What is negative SEO and how to guard against it

SEO is a double-edged sword: While it can help a site improve its ranking in search engine results, it can also have the opposite impact. Some malicious people use the techniques of SEO to deteriorate the SEO sites of their competitors. This practice is called negative SEO (NSEO for intimates).

The main negative SEO techniques

We fight better against an enemy when we know how he acts. Before seeing how to protect yourself from negative SEO, I suggest you first analyze the techniques it uses.

You are not unaware that search engines are constantly improving their algorithms to bring out quality sites at the top of the ranking of results. On the other hand, sites that do not comply with their recommendations will be poorly referenced. Therefore, the NSEO is inspired by the penalties of search engines to impact the SEO of a site negatively.

Here are for example some practices that search engines sanction:

• duplicate content
• SEO over-optimized content
• the backlinks en masse and irrelevant
• content farms
• Techniques that aim to deceive the search engines: cloaking, spamdexing.
• etc.

To destroy the referencing of a site, it is enough to apply to the letter these bad practices. If a competitor has a tooth against you, he can plagiarize your content and mass-cast it on the web, or buy thousands of poor quality backlinks that will damage your reputation with Google. Provided you can hack your site; it can also take control of your site and add advertising, rework your content to affect their quality or edit files for your site to practice spamdexing without you even see it. Not cool at all.

Along with these practices, people who use the NSEO may want to damage your e-reputation so that your site looks less reliable to both users and search engines. They have several levers of action available to them: denounce your site to Google via a spam report, create content denigrating your site, fake profiles on social networks to harm you, etc.

How to know if your site is a victim of negative SEO

Do not panic: if the negative SEO does exist, do not fall into paranoia. Three clues allow to suspect an attack:

•          a sudden drop in your site in search engine results
•          a significant and unexplained drop in traffic
•          an alert from Google, telling you that your site does not comply with good SEO practices (valid only as an index of NSEO if you do not do nonsense on your side ...).

Apart from these signs, there is no reason to worry.

Fight against the NSEO

You have noticed one of the three warning signs and thought that you are a victim of NSEO? We will have to take possessions in hand very quickly. The first thing to do is to secure your site so that nobody can enter it. It can be useful in the wake of changing the host for one that will be more secure.

Once you have regained control of your site, you will need to check your contents and files and remove any changes that the hacker has made.

Finally, you will probably have to disallow backlinks that affect your SEO. You can locate the links that point to your site through Open Site Explorer, a site offered by Moz (SEO expert). Then you will be able to erase the links you do not want by connecting to the Google Webmaster Tools tool, which will guide you step by step.

Prevention is better than cure

Let's face it, going back to its initial ranking after a negative SEO attack is not an easy task, and you have to be patient. The simplest is still to prevent, rather than heal. These tips will help you protect yourself against the NSEO (even if an attack is still possible):

•          secure your site as much as possible when it is created
•          Regularly check your backlinks and keep an eye on your traffic sources
•          monitor that your content is not Replicated (you can use tools such as Positano or Plagium )
•          link your social network profiles with your website
•      practice the white hat to get a good SEO and counter-carré NSEO attacks.