5 Signals to Identify Negative SEO Attacks
Negative SEO is one of the most talked about topics since the launch of Google’s penguin update. After the algorithm update was rolled out, there have been several speculations regarding the inception of negative SEO. Google, who always preached the triumph of good over evil, has somehow accepted that negative SEO is possible but is very rare. But even the slightest possibility for such an evil thing is enough for online marketers and web entrepreneurs to give nightmares. As we are living in an era where getting hit by Panda or penguin or any other algorithmic penalty is haunting, the presence of negative SEO is something we should take into consideration and it is should not be neglected.
What really is negative SEO?
Negative SEO in layman terms means strategically affecting or completely destroying the rankings/traffic of a site. In other terms, negative SEO includes all the tactics that can degrade a sites rankings and traffic. It is not easy to destroy a site’s rankings completely but it certainly is possible to affect it through negative SEO.
How it all started:
When Google rolled out updates such as Penguin and Panda, targeted to fight web spam and penalize sites which are involved in spam, there has been uproar of negative SEO in the SEO community. The speculations proved correct when a successful demonstration of negative SEO was done on a self proclaimed SEO guru, to see if negative SEO works. Today, there are several companies offering evil service of negative SEO claiming they can destroy your competitor’s online presence for just a few bucks.
As a turnaround of these events, it has become important to become aware of the negative SEO and take primitive steps, so that your site will not be the next target.
Give me the signals already?
So my fellow SEOs, following are the 5 signals which you should monitor closely to avoid any penalty which could be imposed because of negative SEO attacks on your site:
1. Backlink Profile:
This is perhaps the most important to monitor for avoiding any possible negative SEO attacks. Negative SEO is mostly done off-site, thus the most vulnerable aspect of a site is its backlink profile.
There is a popular tool named Ahrefs, which shows a graph of backlinks and months in its dashboard. You should be able to do this by simply signing up for a free account and using the “Site Explorer”. If should look something like this:
If negative SEO is being done for your site by building crappy links, the graph will show an unnatural spike in the recent months. This is a clear signal that tons of junk links are created for your site, which is enough for frowning Google. But a sudden spike in backlinks doesn’t always mean a possibility of negative SEO attack, so perform detailed analysis before coming to any conclusion.
2.Content Scraping:
Even if you write amazing content, you can never be sure that there is no one out there who can’t copy your content. There are enough black hatters and low life internet users who just don’t want to do the hard work. These are people who just scrape content from other sites and publish it on theirs. These scrapers have programs which are designed for crawling sites, scraping content and publishing it content on a particular site.
To identify content scrapers and stop them from ruining your effort, you should always have your guard on. Copyscape is an amazing tool to identify content plagiarism; I also highly recommend reading Neil Patel’s blog post on how to avoid content scraping.
3. Site Load Time:
You should also keep a close look on the site’s load time. If someone is trying to do negative SEO and scraping content of your site, they probably have a dishonorable spider that crawls your site and stores the content in a database. If you are experiencing higher than average site load time, you should have a close look at the site’s server log and identify where the bandwidth is going. If you find out something unnatural or you find a suspicious program that is accessing your site more than average, you should block it either on server level or through robots.txt file. Doing this will save your bandwidth and will stop that program from accessing your site.
4. Irrelevant Keywords in Google Analytics:
If you are an average Google Analytics user, you will easily find the keywords section under in Traffic Sources < Sources < Search < Organic. If you use Google Analytics on your site, you should have noticed the keywords which are driving traffic to your site. These are the keywords for which your site ranks in search engines. If you see any irrelevant keywords in “Organic Search Traffic”, you should do some instant digging on that and find out the exact reason for these referrals. It may be the case where someone is doing negative SEO for your site, targeting those “irrelevant” keywords and because of the reason your site is “temporarily” ranking for these keywords.
5. Fake Reviews:
A business can’t satisfy it’s every costumer and it is inevitable to receive a few bad reviews. But, the point of concern is when your site starts to receive a bulk of negative reviews especially exact same review on multiple sites. Although these reviews look fake but still can repel some of your potential leads. It is not easy to monitor each and every review for your site but if you see a negative review or a review that look fake, you should perform a Google search immediately and look if the same review has been posted on multiple sites. You can do this by performing a simple Google search for the exact review. By doing this, you will have all the sites in which the same review was posted. Another great technique to track these activities is setting Google Alerts for your site’s name. After setting Google Alerts, you will receive an email notification whenever someone mentions your site’s name on the web. This is an amazing way to keep a track of where your site’s name is being mentioned on the web.
Conclusion:
If you can manage the above, you will be in a pretty good shape to identify a negative SEO attack in its preliminary state and can easily avoid the penalty. Keep in mind, there is nothing worse than bringing your competitors down just because you can’t outrank them.
Well, enough jitters for today! So, what is your strategy to identify negative SEO attacks?
It puzzles me why people are still doing negative SEO in this day and age when so many developments has been made to prevent it. I suppose, like you said, some people just want a short cut for everything.
It’s great to know some things to look out for though and I will be keeping an eye on those mentioned above. I have experienced fake negative reviews in the past and they can be really damaging so it’s best to stay alert.
Great tips Ajaz, thanks.
Hey Chris, I’m glad you like the post. Yes, there are black hatters or spammers out there who want shortcut for everything. The truth is, there is no shortcut in SEO. Fake reviews can damage the reputation, so being alert is the only option here.
Ajaz
As long as you have a high quality site and continue to work within the search engine guidelines even if there is a negative SEO attack (very slim chance) there shouldn’t be any problems. Low quality links are a natural part of any websites link profile. Stop worrying about this type of thing and focus on growing your brand.
Cameron, you are correct about the branding and positive efforts. But even if their is slightest chance of impact by these negative efforts, it is a serious concern.
Thanks for commenting though,
Ajaz
It is always better to maintain relevancy of the backlinks we create. Following niche is the best policy.
Yes, James. Acquiring niche links is always great and helps a lot in building a strong backlink profile.
Ajaz
totally agree with you Ajaz, you need to know if someone is trying negative seo your site. Even if you have a good content, the black hatter still try finding better method to bring you down.
Thanks! Good Article for SEO
WOW. few people know #3.
If you use plugins and extentions on your site… use the ones that load async too keep load time low..
ALSO to BUILD your seo,
6. Use Google+.
Google is pushing it really hard right now.
7. Don’t guess at your keywords.
- use google adwords traffic estimator to accurately plan
- create emotionally surprising content for that keyword and related alternates
- compare traffic vs ctr vs conversion.
(the terms that bring the biggest traffic don’t always bring sales)
8. If you’re not a professionally trained writer, hire a college student for $35.
Google reads grammar. You’ll get penalized
9. Phone call bloggers.
Ask them to link to you. Offer unrefusable value back. They never get calls. You’ll stand out.
10. Use a high speed server.
Google wants to feel fast. They can’t if you’re site takes longer than 2 seconds to load. Use a site like Pingdom or other to test yours.
11. Join 20 DOFollow Discussion Forums.
Do NOT use the signature to place links. It’s all duplicate content. Personally write DIFFERENT signatures with varying anchor text links to your site.
12. Use Reddit under the right SUBREDDIT. It’s DoFollow.
And bloggers link to Reddit all the time
13. Don’t use directory links.
There’s an actually Google HELP doc that say’s you’ll be considered spammy
Partially stolen from sparkah.com/blog
Dear Admin, can u please tell me a plugin to identify the content scrappers IP.
Hi Sunny,
Once you identify the scraper, you can easily find their IP using whois/domaintools.
Yes, but what good is the ip? It isn’t like you can identify them…doesn’t it just tell you what general region they connected from? They could be travelling and using a public wifi, right?
Great article on negative SEO. The ahrefs tools is a must have and well worth the free account
It’s really too bad people are wasting their time with negative seo instead of doing something more productive.
This has become more of a problem.
Although I would not tell anyone to act unethically, site owners are being placed in an awkward position.
Do you let this happen, and have your site be the only one in the serps with negative links pointed at them? Do you take the risk, and spend hours each month culling your inbound links list and nursing the disvow tool.
Or…
Does the site owner pop out to Fiverr and point 100,000 negative links back at the others in the serps. This costs about $25, and ensures that everyone else is in the same stinky boat.
There is no good ethical answer to this from the website owner’s perspective. No one wants to engage in this activity because it just feels wrong and dirty. Yet…. if your competitor calls you names publicly, you might respond publicly. Negative SEO is very much in this camp. I know many site owners who have taken the low road in order to level the playing field. As I see this debacle playing out, I side with the victims. I don’t like it, but it is what it is.
The ONLY way for Google to stop this is to come out and say that they will not penalize a site based on links.
Hi,
I am doing SEO for a website that deals in 4-wheeler tyres. While reviewing the organic traffic in Google Analytics, i noticed some keywords that are completely irrelevant to the theme of the website. Some are porn related terms while some are like google, yahoo, laptops, youtube etc. It seems someone is doing negative SEO for my website, as a result of which a decent number of searches are coming from these irrelevant terms. What should i do to block traffic from such terms as this may harm my website’s performance in search engines.
Please suggest.
Thanks,
David
Neil Patel is involved in negative SEO and link collusion with his online marketing buddies.
He has also removed all negative comments from his site and is connected to people that offer negative SEO in India.
Its mostly the big internet marketers like him and the sites he links to that are will do anything at anyone’s expense to destroy keyword competitors and anyone that writes anything negative about him, his sites and his connections.
People like this are only interested in one thing and that;s making money online at anyone’s expense.
Anyone who threatens them in anyway and they will do whatever it takes to wipe you out.