The recent Google Penguin update has made Negative SEO much easier. In case you have not heard of Negative SEO before, here is a little explanation.
Google penalizes websites that openly violate its quality guidelines. Called web spam, or “black hat” techniques, practicing deceptive or manipulative behavior in order to improve search engine rankings is considered wrong and will result in dropped search engine rankings. But what happens when a competitor, aiming to get your site penalized, violates Google’s guidelines on your behalf? This is called Negative SEO, and while it is rare, it is something that can happen.
Some common Negative SEO techniques include site intrusions, content manipulation, and link spamming.
- A site intrusion can be hacking websites or injecting malware. An example of content manipulation is the creation of falsely duplicated content across the internet; when Google crawls the duplicate content of fake sites, the real site is ignored or punished as duplicate content.
- Link spamming is building many links from low-quality link sources and pointing them to a competitor’s website. Google might identify the links as unnatural or artificial and send out a spam alert that could affect the site’s rankings. In order to protect you against Negative SEO, let’s look at each of the different areas in detail.
Site Intrusion:
Site intrusion happens when your web server gets hacked. In order to penalize your rankings, hackers install malware or malicious code into your HTML source code.
Google is able to detect these relatively easily, and will delist your site to protect online visitors. The good news is that if you find malicious code and remove it, your site should get re indexed by Google within days or weeks, depending on how popular your website is.
Content Manipulation:
To avoid penalization, I recommend checking for duplicate content often — you can do so by using Copyscape.com. More simply, you can grab a unique sentence (5-15 words long) from your website, put it in quotation marks, and search for it in Google. If any other sites come up, check them to see if they have copied the majority of your content. If they copied only a few sentences, it may be OK.
If a handful of sites copied you, contact them to ask that your content be removed; or send a cease-and-desist letter. If they refuse, you can file a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaint. Google provides a reporting tool to communicate issues about web search and content found on YouTube, Google plus pages, etc.
To avoid duplicate content Negative SEO, I recommend that you update your website content often, at least monthly. Follow Google’s quality guidelines about producing relevant, useful, and engaging content.
Link Spamming:
If your site has too many low-quality links vs. high-quality links, your site may get penalized. This is what the new Google algorithm called Penguin does. Penguin is a filter which is run every so often and it is not in real time. Therefore, if you get penalized and you start cleaning the spam, it may take weeks before you recover from the penalty.
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