Facts and misconceptions about negative SEO | Weboptim
A Google Penguin algorithm was introduced to filter out unnatural link profiles. However, it also allowed website owners to deliberately weaken the websites of competitors. There are many methods that malicious users can use, but the most common is to manipulate link relationships by directing links to your website that are of poor quality and/or against Google's guidelines.
Does it really exist? Yes.
For a while, Google treated the phenomenon as non-existent, but after some time it finally admitted that there might be a possibility that someone was deliberately trying to damage a website's rankings. For example, by modifying robot.txt, hacking the server, placing low quality or penalised links to our website.
The good news, however, is that negative SEO is quite a complicated process.
Mi NO counts as negative SEO?
Many companies think that their competitors are attacking their website: they look at their link profile and see things that they think are definitely not their own, but most likely a competitor's.
Some common problems:
1. 'Strange' links may not be bad links
There are aggregator sites that connect almost every website on the internet. For example, most websites have links from a page on lap.hu or from linkcenter.hu.
2. Sitewide links are not always harmful
Sitewide links are placed in the footer of web pages, and because the footer appears on every subpage, the outbound link appears on every page of the website with the same link text. However, a single link of this type does not mean negative SEO, even if it results in thousands of links in total.
3. Previous link purchases
Almost every website owner has used the link building method of buying a link package (which included, for example, 50 link directory registrations) in exchange for a certain amount of money. These links have of course been modified or removed over time, but sometimes you may come across a new link that still uses the settings you provided at the time.
4. Link building from previous SEO companies
There are cases where it turns out that the staff of the SEO company you used before have placed unnatural links to your website. For example, they used keyword link building in order to improve organic rankings. Until Penguin was updated, these link connections worked fine, but since then Google has been penalising them.
5. Hacking
It is possible that our website is hacked and new pages are created, which are then redirected to a lot of spam links. If you look at your link profile and see strange link text, there is a good chance that you have been hacked. However, if we can find the subpage to which the links are pointing, we can remove them, and we can even find the point where the hackers got in and fix the error.
Signs that may indicate negative SEO
1. Links from abroad about forums
2. Lots of links coming in .ro, .ru, .cz etc. from a domain ending in
Not all of these links are harmful, but if there are a lot of links to our site in a short period of time, it is likely that someone is attacking the site.
3. Many links from pointless blog posts
4. Plenty keyword link type (e.g. some sitewide links)
5. From adult sites incoming links (e.g. gambling, sex sites, etc..)
6. Redirecting penalised pages to our website
Not all redirects are bad; a problem can occur if only 3 redirects appear in the link profile one week and 300 the next. Google uses a variety of methods to determine whether the redirect was made by us between our pages, or whether someone else is trying to create one. If it detects an external influence, it will ignore the link.
Should you worry about negative SEO?
Google is working on algorithms to protect websites from this type of attack. In most cases, there's no need to worry about negative SEO: for the average business owner, an intense SEO attack would cost more money and effort than it would take to strengthen their website through proper search engine optimisation.
How can you protect against it?
Algorithms cannot guarantee that third-party camel movements will not affect search results up to 100%.
If you regularly check a the link profile of our website, you can easily discover unnatural links. It is always worth doing this monthly, but if you feel your site is under attack, you can do it once or twice a week. There are several ways to perform link profile analysis: you can choose an automated solution, but it can be much more efficient to do it manually, using a variety of tools. In this way, in addition to finding bad links, you can also discover countless new link acquisition opportunities.
Shortly after the 2012 Penguin algorithm update, Google introduced the disavow tool which allows website owners to ask Google to ignore certain links.
Summary
- Not all negative SEO is what it seems. Just because you find strange link connections, don't immediately assume that a competitor is behind them.
- In most cases, Google's algorithms will detect that a third party has caused a sudden, worthless link increase and will not take them into account when ranking.
- Such actions are more common in the large and high-paying competitive sectors.
- If you have already been penalised for unnatural links, Google will find it harder to distinguish between unnatural links and negative SEO.
Source: moz.com