Two Effective Ways to Prevent Negative SEO

Do you know what negative SEO is? Would you like to know how to prevent negative SEO? Well, negative SEO is actually the process of devaluing a webpage or a website from SERPs. The techniques used in negative SEO will result in SEO penalties so that the owner, who knows nothing about all devaluing process, will likely lose his website. Even though there is nothing illegal about negative SEO, it is actually a harmful practice. A website that becomes a target of negative SEO will likely to go down and the owner might go bankrupt. This condition is somehow threatening as no one knows who will become the next target of negative SEO. With the growing number of spammers and negative SEO consultants, the practice of negative SEO potentially increase significantly.

Because Google did not want to admit that negative SEO has a real effect to a website that becomes a target, website owners and webmasters should take an action. They should figure out the most effective ways to prevent negative SEO. If they know how to prevent negative SEO, they can protect their website from negative SEO. Basically, there are two effective ways to prevent negative SEO. They are:

1. Monitor the Profile of Your Website’s Backlink

This action should be taken now or you will see that your website ranking will significantly drop from SERP. As you should have known, the number of competitors out there that want your business to go bankrupt is surely many. Your competitors will likely do everything to become on the first page of a search engine including making negative campaign about your website.

Basically, monitoring your backlink profile enables you to know whether there are malicious link directed toward your website. To monitor your website’s backlink profile, you had better use a paid tool like Raven Tools or SEOMoz PRO because a paid tool provides more accurate yet comprehensive result. If you don’t want to spend money on a tool to monitor your website’s backlink profile, you can choose a free tool.

When you monitor your website’s backlink profile, you should pay attention to some indications of negative SEO. They are:

Links from bad neighborhood sites including backlinks from adult, gambling, and other illicit types of website.
Links from foreign language sites.
Links from websites that trigger malware warning from your browsers.
Links from pages that have more than 50 links in their body texts.
Links from pages that appear to be created solely to spam search engines.

2. Use Google’s Disavow Tool to Report Suspected Negative SEO Attacks

If you feel that your website seemingly becomes a victim of a negative SEO attack, you will need to report the attack to Google. Reporting negative SEO attacks help you to protect your website from further attacks. As you should have known, once your website is attacked by negative SEO, your site needs to be repaired. This will create lots of hassles as your webmasters need to determine which low quality links that need to be removed and to persuade hosting webmasters to remove the identified harmful links. If you have reported suspected links, you will be able to prevent great loss.

Thankfully, Google has a Disavow Links Tool that enables you to report for potentially harmful links easily and fast. To use the tool, you will need to visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main. Using this tool, you can create a file to let Google know which links are suspected. In this case, you just need to follow all steps. There should be only 3 types of information that you write on disavow.txt. They are: