Protect your website from negative SEO

In the past 3 years SEO Industry experienced in major changes. Nowadays, Many Digital Marketers have changing their strategies, when they get experienced with their output. As All we know Google is a Top Search Engine in all over the world. Worldwide there are 1.5 trillion searches per year.

So, It is not easy to rank your website for competitive keywords on Google Search Engine like 3 years before. Digital Marketers found a solution called black hat SEO which are totally giving unsatisfied results.

What is Negative SEO?

“Negative SEO means any malware attempt taken against your website to harm your rankings from Google Search Results”

Here I am explaining what is negative SEO and how can you protect your website from becoming affected. If you wanted to brand your business digitally and keeping it safe, follow the steps.

Negative SEO Attacks may happen in different ways:

Removing High DA backlinks your website has.
Damaging your reputation in online by creating fake social media profiles.
By Hacking your website.
Copying your quality website content and sharing it all over the internet.
Building more number of bad links to your website.
Create backlinks by pointing irrelevant keywords to your website.

How to stop your website from Negative Search Engine Optimization attacks?

1. Setup Email alerts through your Google Search Console

Google Search Console will send you Email Alerts when,

Your pages are not indexed.
When you have server connectivity issues.
When your website attacked by malware

How to Enable Alerts in Search Console?

Step 1: Login your Website’s Google Search Console.

Step 2: In top right side corner, click the settings icon. Click the first option “Search Console Preferences”

Step 3: Once Clicked, there will be an option called Email Notifications, enable it.

2. Keep EYE on your Backlinks

Mostly Spammers will do Negative SEO against your website through building low quality backlinks or link redirection. There are some online free tools Open Site Explorer, Monitor Backlinks and Ahrefs to check the links. I would like to suggest Open Site Explorer to check your website backlinks. It helps you to check manually if somebody building low quality links to your website.

3. Safe your High Quality Backlinks

Mostly spammers will try to delete your High Quality Backlinks. They will easily find the owner of the backlink, then spammers request google search console to delete your quality backlink.

To avoid this, you can do one thing

When you create Google Search Console, use email address from your domain name instead of gmail, Hotmail or yahoo. In this route, you can prove that, you are the only owner of the website and no one have access to it. The email id should looks like yourname@yourdomain.com.

4. Protect your website from Malware attacks and hacking

If you are using wordpress website, install Google Authenticator Plugin to protect your website. It gives you a verification password. Whenever you log in to your website, you need to add a code which will be generated by Google Authenticator Plugin. This is available in both Android and iOS.

Use Backup Plugin – Take Backup of Files and Database on a regular basis. If your website is affected by malware, you can put your website backup to make it live.
Use Special Characters, Numbers, Caps & Small Letters to create strong password.

5. Analyze Website Duplicate Content

Use Copyscape to check your website duplicate content. Because there is a possibility from spammers, copy your website content and post it in somewhere else to lose rankings.

6. Keep checking social media profiles

Spammers will create fake social media profiles using your company name. You can remove those spam profiles by reporting them.

Use Mention Tool to create alerts to find who is using your brand name. Create an Alert with your Brand Name or Company Name. This will show you the spammer who creates fake social profiles.