Everything you need to know about negative SEO

These illegal actions may destroy business competitors and lead to their downfall.  Having a principled business, legal SEO and healthy competition with competitors is the best course of action, but not everyone can do it and use illegal methods.

What is negative SEO?

All illegal actions that are done instead of competing with competitors and trying to standardize their SEO are called negative SEO. Negative SEO or black SEO is opposite to positive SEO and all the actions that are done in them are completely different from each other. In negative SEO, the actions taken are illegal and unprincipled, which are done to hit or destroy the competing business, but in positive SEO, business owners try to use legal and principled methods to SEO their site. Upgrade and improve your site ranking in search results. In a positive SEO, all actions taken are legal and if done correctly can provide good results for the business owner.

In negative SEO, business owners try to destroy the competing business, that is, instead of competing with their competitors and taking useful steps to overtake them, the business destroys them. They cut or hit and fall.

Therefore, negative SEO can occur on the Internet for all businesses by their competitors, but negative SEO is a very long process that requires more time and energy. If you have tough competitors and your business has achieved success and top rankings, it is better to pay attention because you may also suffer from negative SEO. If the negative SEO process is done professionally and in a complex way, even the Google search engine may not recognize it.

Different methods of negative SEO:

Negative SEO has different methods and can be done in various ways. Here are some ways to do negative SEO and how to deal with it:

1- Website hacking:

Today we all know that it is possible to hack pages on the internet and there are some professional hackers who do this easily. Hacking is one of the methods that can be used by competitors to downgrade and destroy businesses. Your competitors may hack into your website admin panel by hacking your website and using spammed links or redirecting them to malicious sites, harm your site or redirect your site traffic to their own. After the admin panel of your site falls into the hands of competitors and hackers, they may take any action to damage your site.

- Anti-hacking strategies:

To prevent hackers from hacking your website with negative SEO goals , it is better to strengthen the site's security measures to make it harder to enter the site. If you have used content management systems such as WordPress to create and build your site, you can use the Google Authenticator plugin to strengthen its security measures to enter the admin panel. By using this plugin and making its settings, you can easily strengthen the security measures and make the process of entering the site management panel more difficult. You have to use complex passwords that consist of letters and numbers. You can even use two-step encryption to make logging in to the admin panel more difficult and secure.

2- Spam Links:

Having one or more spam links within your website does not do much damage to your site and does not eliminate your site altogether, but there are some spam links that are related to each other and form a large collection. Have formed what are called Link Farms. Link Farms are a collection of spammed links that have the same anchor text, which may be a specialized word or phrase, or even unrelated to your site content. But clicking on these inline texts activates the spammed links that are related to each other and disrupts the structure of your site. Also, the structure of these link farms is such that the site owner is blamed.

- Strategies to deal with spammed links:

Negative SEO attacks or spammed links cause a lot of serious damage to the website and the results are irreparable. But the best way to deal with such links is to investigate and prevent this from happening. This means that if a spammed link occurs, the results will be irreversible, so it is best to prevent spammed links from occurring before they occur. Preventing spam links can occur by managing and controlling backlinks and external links. One of the tools used to better and more accurately manage backlinks is SEO Spyglass. Using this tool, you can check the number of domain referencing links.

Using the graph data provided by this tool, you can review and analyze the referenced external links, and if the backlinks are not referred to reasonable and good sites, it is better to take the necessary measures to review Carefully check whether these links are from Link Farms or not.

If you have detected malicious links, it is better to delete all of them yourself, and if you could not remove the malicious links, it is better to create a Disavow file that will remove and reject the malicious links. Disavow means rejecting malicious links and denying the site dependence on such links, or in other words, the search engine optimization and Google is told to ignore such links when indexing the site.

3- Copying the contents of your website:

Copying the contents and contents of your site is another negative SEO way, in other words, by copying your contents, people steal from the contents of your site and do illegal work. Of course, copying content by users is not illegal, it is illegal and theft when a competitor does it with the aim of destroying and destroying the website. Google search engine is very sensitive to duplicate and duplicate content and if it detects and the content is duplicate, it will definitely give them negative points and will prevent them from indexing or displaying in the top rankings of search results. Of course, Google is smart enough to recognize the original version of the content, but sometimes it is possible to find and index the copied version sooner than the original version, in which case the original version of the content may not be indexed by Google and instead Index the copied content, which causes a lot of damage to the site.

- Copy Content Solution:

To deal with duplicate content and prevent the copied version from being indexed instead of the original version, it is best to use the Copyscape tool so that you can identify sites that are copying and using your content. Deal with them. If you used this tool and saw a site that copied your content and used it on their site, it is better to contact them first and ask them to delete your copied content. If they did not delete it, you can use the copyright infringement report tool to report to Google that they have copied and used your content.

4- Remove your best backlinks:

Another negative SEO method used to eliminate and damage sites is to persuade site owners to remove effective and principled backlinks . In this case, you will send a message or email to the owner of other sites to which you have referred backlinks and they will be asked to remove the backlinks referred to your site. In this case, by removing effective backlinks, the site will lose the traffic it received from those sites. So this is a disaster and a failure for the site.

- How to deal with the removal of effective backlinks:

In this method, where you send a message or email to the owners of the sites to which you have referred backlinks, it is better to use personal email when communicating with the owners of those sites. To reduce the likelihood of this happening. Or you can even use the MonitorBacklinks.com tool. Using this tool, you can view, analyze and review all backlinks and external links referred to, and mark effective and good backlinks so that you are notified when something happens to those backlinks. .

5- Creating fake accounts in virtual networks with your brand name:

To destroy your name and brand, some accounts are created in social networks to destroy your name and brand by publishing illegal content and change the mentality of users towards you. It is better to be vigilant to prevent this from happening and deal with it so that your name and brand are not destroyed.

- How to deal with the destruction of your brand:

To do this, you must be vigilant and identify such accounts and spam and report those accounts to be deleted and prevented from further activity. You can use Mention.net to identify accounts that use your name and brand.

How can we understand if our site has a negative SEO?

- Creating a large number of links from ru, .cz, .cn, .pl, .ro, .bg, .bz, .com domains. Of course, having backlinks from this type of domain does not always mean that It is not normal, but if the number of these links suddenly increases, there is a possibility of attack and negative SEO.
- A large number of links from unrelated websites appear suddenly
- A large number of links suddenly appear from unauthorized and illegal sites
- Creating a large number of links with anchor texts from various sources

Google search engine, which aims to gain user satisfaction, is trying to provide solutions and some algorithms to eliminate this type of attack and establish the security of sites and businesses on the Internet. But with the development of Google's security algorithms , hackers and profiteers are also looking for solutions that they can crack down on and profit from illegal means, so such attacks may be possible but very rare. Of course, if your website and business is not very large, this is less likely to happen. But if you have a large and extensive site and business that has more competitors, you need to be careful and take the necessary steps to prevent this from happening.