Last year Google released a series of search engine algorithm updates (Panda and Penguin), in an attempt to reduce web-spam and de-rank sites that had a low-quality backlink profile.
This was of course great news for the ‘good citizens’ of ethical webmasters who were tired of seeing their hard work go to complete waste, by having their good work ripped off by somebody else who then ranked higher than them, however it also opened a whole new can of whoop-ass for black-hatters and spammers who made and still make use of negative SEO practices, to sabotage their competitors rankings.
Negative SEO has many acts, if you want to learn more about Negative SEO and its tactics, check out the following post –
So what happens if you become a victim of negative SEO? How do you recover from it?
I suppose the phrase ‘to recover’ wouldn’t be the appropriate words to use, but more over to outbalance the effects of negative SEO is possible.
The strategy is really, really simple; just continue or increase your efforts on building high quality, domain authority backlinks to your blog as well as building amazing content. That means increasing your guest blogging efforts on high-traffic authority blogs, and creating more quality and resourceful content for your blog too. In fact for every 2 posts you put out on your blog, you should try and write an awesome guest post to follow.
So what else can you do?
- Increase social activity
- Use content curation sites like Scoop.it and Stori.fy and Pinterest
- Share content on social bookmarking sites
- Do video marketing (YouTube)
So we’ve established you need to increase your input on building quality backlinks and creating epic content, so now how do you monitor and prevent negative SEO from doing further damage? Let’s take a look.
5 Ways To Prevent Negative SEO
1. Keep an eye on your backlink profile. To do this you should consider using one of the following sites/tools; OpenSiteExplorer, Majestic SEO or AHREFs.
2. Use Google’s Disavow tool which can be found in your Google Webmaster Tools dashboard here – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main. Ensure that you have tried to negotiate with site owners about removing any concerning links to your site/blog before using this tool. Also be careful not to accidentally suggest the removal of legitimate links, this could have real undesired effects to your rankings if they are removed.
3. Keep an eye out for warnings in your Google Webmaster Tools dashboard.
4. Stay alert and keep an eye out for any sudden drop in traffic or increase in bounce rate in your Google Analytics.
5. Finally, make your site/blog negative SEO or Google proof, and by that I mean look at other ways to increase traffic outside of SEO, i.e. social networking, using YouTube, building an email list, podcasting etc.
So keep these tips in mind to help you outbalance the effects of negative SEO and to better monitor your backlinks and traffic. If you’ve lost traffic due to Google slap, you can only do so much and wait for a next update to take place to see if your efforts wins over. If all else fails, then whilst I hate to suggest this option, you can always start again from complete scratch.
Share your views, points and suggestions.
So I hope this post has been helpful to you, however as always I’m itching to hear your thoughts and reactions. Do you have your own tips and suggestions? Is there anything above that I’ve mentioned you feel is incorrect? If so, correct me… Leave me a comment below as always.
Image courtesy of Flickr user: 23spaces