Are you someone who believes in quick traffic tethering on your website without much effort? The fakeness on your website creates a bad reputation and position. It will be harmful to your website presence, and in the long run, you will lose your potential customers.
The blunder of information on the website would result in the website hanging and frustrate your audience. Let’s understand the negative SEO practices with an example. Suppose a customer is searching for a t-shirt to buy for under 1000 Rs on Google search results. There are a variety of e-commerce websites available for the customer to click on a link. But what if the customer meets with a new website with other similar options not the same. Such an experience will leave the customer disheartened situation. It brings your website down, and you will observe a sudden decline in your business growth. This practice is known as Negative SEO.
The bad impact of Negative SEO has been seen in the long run. Perhaps for the quick instance, it seems a great tactic to gimmick audiences. In addition to the website’s bad performance, your business and reputation will both be affected. Thus, yes, negative SEO impacts badly on your website badly.
But you know what, in the last few years, Google has certainly become clever and smart! Thanks to its advanced modern algorithms, which quickly detect any fraud or fakiness happening on digital platforms and impose a penalty.
Thus, the business needs to take care of Negative SEO to secure a solid, robust, and credible position on Google.
In this blog, we will identify the traits of Negative SEO, its types, and how to detect negative SEO on a website. So let’s begin!
Why Is Negative SEO Dangerous?
Let’s understand with an example: Imagine a user searches for “buy a t-shirt under 1000 Rs.” They land on a misleading website offering unrelated products. The result? Frustration and lost trust. Over time, such tactics will decrease your website’s credibility and lead to a sharp drop in traffic and conversions.
Thankfully, Google has advanced algorithms to detect and penalize websites that engage in or are targeted by negative SEO. However, it’s crucial for businesses to stay vigilant and proactively defend against these threats.
Type of Negative SEO
The negative SEO would harm your website. So let’s check the negative seo below types.
Spam Links
Negative SEO can be done by using spam links. The spamming links harness the position of the website and result in a low ranking. Spamming links are paid links that can be bought or generated from link generators or exploited by using third-party services on the website. In any case, the spam links take users to the wrong webpage, which diminishes their user experience.
According to Google, 75% of websites hacked by Google contained spam links. Another technique to use spamming with anchor text. In the anchor text, the website forcefully copied links to some other websites and incorporated them into the webpage.
Duplicate Content
Another technique to perform negative SEO on the website is to add duplicate content on the website. Duplicate content degrades the ranking of your website, such as a tactic the competitor’s website uses when it achieves a fast ranking in time.
The duplicate content is available on the internet paid and free. It is a bad idea for your website. The Google algorithm, when it finds duplicate content on your website, allows a Google penalty. It will degrade website ranking. If you are scraping web content, many paid content plagiarism checker tools detect copied content on your website and resulting in a low ranking of your website. The duplicate content negatively affects your website. Google indexing is not possible on duplicate content.
Fake Reviews
Google Search Console can also lead to a discriminatory move. The competitors adopt non-permissible parameters to spread negative reviews and content on Google. It is a misleading activity, and it is against Google policy. You can request that Google regarding fake reviews added by your competitors to keep your website image down. If Google gets the right consent, then it will inform the competitor regarding this so that it avoids future annoying annoyingly.
For example, if you have an e-commerce account like a website, Amazon, GMB, etc, you get easily known by the fake reviews. Fake reviews are a gambling method and are a part of negative SEO. The fake reviews on public Google profiles ultimately disturb business sales.
Fake Social Accounts
Social media is the go-to source to grab audiences who could be potential for you. The potential audiences or followers believe what you are sharing with them on social accounts. Social media channels help your business sales when you take it in the right direction.
The fake social accounts upscale your business at first glance but will decline your identity in the long run. Competitors deploy such gimmicks to trace your audiences on their accounts and make them impulsive shopping. To identify fake social accounts you should connect with a digital marketing company or digital marketing agency. The competitors can glitch with audiences or buy fake audiences, and improve their visible followers on social media. It is a tactic that businesses can promote their identities with a number of followers on social media. But it is a bad practice to increase social followers.
Website Manipulation and Denial of Service DDoS
Such practice is performed at the backend when the malicious code is integrated into the website code. With such practice, negative seo hackers, manipulate or change the original website. It will ultimately downgrade the website’s performance and defame its identity. Some of the common tactics for website manipulation are the placement of confusing keywords, adding span content, etc.
Sometimes the competitor performs DDoS or denial of service on your website. In this scenario, your website will not be responsive when any user requests it. The server will display another website and it will gradually reduce website traffic.
Why Do Competitors Use Negative SEO?
The main motivation is to harm your online presence while boosting theirs. They want to:
- Overtake your rankings
- Divert your traffic
- Damage your brand credibility
How to detect Negative SEO?
There is always a defense plan to detect negative SEO on your website. Here below, we will discuss them one by one.
Drop in Search Rankings
When your website faces a sudden fall in rankings, one reason could be spamming. The important practice to detect Negative SEO for your website can be done with Google Search Console GSC. The various positions of keywords reduce your website’s ranking. Find the real-time analytics of website position and reason with a perfectly aligned tool for SEO.
Monitor Fake Reviews
Identify the fake reviews your website contains. The fake reviews available on Google or on social media accounts damage your identity badly. The fake reviews are spread on Google My Business GMB, Trustpilot, Glassdoor, Yelp, etc.
Reviews are the identification of your presence on Google SERP, but that does not mean that you should ask for fake reviews. It is a misleading activity that will spoil your public identity in the long run.
Duplicate Content
Checking any duplicate content on your website should be a mandatory task. In this practice, you should manually or use a tool on your website and figure out any duplicate content. For checking or detecting duplicate content on the website, tools like Copyscape, Duplichecker, Small SEO, etc, are the best tools. Using these tools, you can deduce any duplicate content on your website.
If you have found any duplicate content on your website, then you should report it to Google; otherwise, your rankings will drop.
Backlink Checker
SEO helps you evaluate the backlinks’ performance. But when your website contains negative or bad SEO, then the rankings downfall in your website’s performance. With the help of intelligent tools, you can identify your backlinks. Google Disavow tool is one such tool for such practice.
The backlink checker helps to identify any spammy links pointing to your website. It also checks anchor texts and finds referring domains. All of these things greatly contribute to improving backlinks.
Website Security
Website security is an important practice that secures your website from any malicious activity. When any attacker tries to intervene on your website in the middle, the secured, certified website with an SSL certificate stops any phishing or breaches from third parties or hackers.
Website Performance
The Google Search Console tool performs a quick analysis of your website. It supports your website security in a great way. The website should require immediate attention if it was built more than 3 years ago. A sudden website audit helps you find any alerts and warnings in code, front UI, content, technical SEO, sales, etc. The crucial parameters should be resolved quickly.
Reasons to Avoid Negative SEO
Surely you have reached this section of the blog. Hope you have learned the actual meaning of Negative SEO.
There are always preventive methods to stop negative SEO on your website. Negative SEO is nothing but a gimmick that adds lucrative to your website at first glance, but in the long run, it would only diminish your website’s trust, credibility, and growth.
If you are stuck with negative seo, then you are in the right place. We recommend you meet with the expert digital marketing agency in Jaipur, which can help them identify the bad or negative SEO on the website.
- Copyscape or other premium SEO plagiarism tools help you to track any duplicity in content.
- A website audit helps you analyze your website and find any issues it has.
- If any duplicity on the website, you can report it to Google. Duplicate content, fake reviews, fake accounts, spam links, website manipulation, etc, are the ideal practices for showcasing a bad impact on your website.
Conclusion
We can’t recommend you practice Negative SEO on your website. We have shared with you the bad impact of negative SEO in the long run. So you should avoid any such tactic on your website. It is advisable that you follow good practices to improve your ranking on your website and maintain a good position on your website.
An SEO company in Jaipur helps you bring your rank higher while fostering your sales. Verve Online Marketing is one of the best SEO agencies in Jaipur, which helps improve your website ranking and helps you to achieve milestones. Connect with us for any further inquiries.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Q1: Can Negative SEO be removed?
Yes, negative SEO effects can be mitigated through audits, disavowing bad links, removing duplicate content, and improving overall site quality.
Q2: How do I report spammy backlinks?
Use Google’s Disavow Tool to report and ignore harmful backlinks pointing to your website.
Q3: Will Google notify me if I’m targeted by Negative SEO?
Not directly. But unusual patterns in your GSC or ranking drops may hint at an issue. Regular monitoring helps.
Q4: What are some tools to detect Negative SEO?
Popular tools include Google Search Console, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, Copyscape, and Sitechecker.
Q5: Can I recover from a Negative SEO attack?
Absolutely. With timely action and professional support, most websites can fully recover and regain their rankings.
Q6: Does buying fake followers or reviews fall under Negative SEO?
Yes. These practices mislead users and violate Google’s terms. They can lead to penalties and long-term damage.
Q7: How often should I audit my website for Negative SEO?
Ideally, once every month or at least quarterly, depending on your website size and competition level.
