Friday 26 October 2012

Should business prepare for the effects of targeted negative SEO?



Should business prepare for the effects of targeted negative SEO?

After reading the different effects of Google updates to combat negative SEO, we found that
businesses were getting worried by negative SEO attacks.
Firstly what is Negative SEO, the definition of Negative SEO from SEO Metro is “a black hat technique that uses bad text links with negative connotations linking back to a competitor’s site, linking competitors to link farms and free-for-all sites, etc.”  It can also include hackers or malware that has infiltrated the site to change or shutdown the site. When these techniques are used it won’t help the sight been seen, causing it to be demoted by Google and SERP (Search Engines Results Page) been lowered.
People have now thought of using these techniques to purposely attempt at hitting competitors site with them and therefore effectively bringing the SERP of the site down. I have heard of cases where business have been targeted by these sorts of companies and have supposedly it has affected their SERP.  

How do you know that you are being attacked?
Well if your website is at page 1 one day for a certain keyword and it not there the next, there may be a chance it could be an attack of Negative SEO. But the best way is investigate what may be the cause of the issue. A way to do this would be looking at backlinks to check that the site isn’t being spammed out to every higga dickary directory site.

A way to check is to monitor your backlinks that can be done by using such SEO tools as :
Monitoring back links allows you to see where your site is being applied; you will mostly see sites that aren’t SEO friendly with low PR or no relevant to the business itself.  These type of link Google picks up and evaluates then judging if it relevant or not, if not it may affect the SERP of the site.
If you find your site down or incorrect data, it could be because of hacking or viruses that have infiltrated the site and therefore need to be taken care of quickly as possible as they could be damaging different areas of the site which will not help the SEO of the site.

Still if your competitors are trying to attack your website, that doesn’t mean that what they’ve doing will cause and problem or any judge able effect. It takes a lot of knowhow and therefore experience to create real negative SEO and therefore they would need to hire someone with that experience to attack.
By just entering the word Negative SEO sites can be found with the aim to strategically attack a customer’s competitor site.

At the end of the day should business be worried about a competitive company, hiring someone to attack competitor SEO?

If you find that someone is taking time and money into attacking your site it can be very damaging and may cause problem.  But looking at some cases people attacking each other though these companies isn’t very cost effective.
The best possible way to prevent and secure your site is to have a clean profile with a good history and having high quality links making it a lot harder to attack your SERP in the short term. The only issue that might be found with it is hard to gain good qualitly of links when you have started up a new website, plus having a site that has already entered itself in poor quailty links.

If you know that the site has been attacked by the negative SEO the best chance of you stopping the effects of it is to report it to Google, then they can check the site and see if the site has been getting attacked and will act accordingly.


For more information about Negative SEO, I would recommend that you look at:
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172844/Understanding-Negative-SEO-How-to-Defend-Your-Website

About Us:-
We are Red Cow Media an Online Marketing Agency based in Manchester, we specialise in Web Design, SEO, Social Media Marketing and more. Check out our website for more information by clicking here.


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