3 Ways to Protect Your Website from Negative SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques are set to make your website appear on top of search engine results pages (SERP). These are the healthy ways your website can use to climb the SERPs.

As there are healthy ways, you can see that there are also unhealthy ways, too. These negative SEO (black hat) techniques are detrimental to your website’s health score.

Some identified black hat SEO techniques include:

• Link spamming
• Link manipulation
• Malicious pages
• Keyword stuffing

If you care about your website, you won’t use black hat techniques to increase your page rank. Instead of increasing your page rank, it ends up doing the complete opposite.

You can see for yourself in the above graph that black hat SEO techniques are detrimental to your website. And you will do well to refrain from using these techniques. In a highly competitive niche, your website might even be sabotaged using black hat SEO techniques.

If you are worried about your website’s protection from black hat SEO, grab your notepad and a pen. Protect your website with this simple ABC method. It’s easy to do and even easier to remember!

Your website’s ABCs against negative SEO

Audit your website’s traffic activity

Monitoring your website is a good habit for website maintenance. This serves as your website’s health check now and then.

One good practice of monitoring is to audit your website’s traffic activity. It’s a good thing that there are a variety of online web tools for checking your website’s activity.

Google Webmaster Tool and websites like sitechecker.pro, can check your website’s activity for free. Premium features are also available with sitechecker.pro to further your website’s monitoring.

These tools provide a range of information about your website. Focus on your website score and other parameters such as the number of backlinks associated with your website.

Here’s what you can find on sitechecker.pro:

After putting your domain in the text box, the website will analyze your website score.

There are also add-ons in which you can check your traffic statistics and page ranking.

By monitoring your website, you can check if there is a sudden increase in the number of backlinks related to your website. This is good news if your website was mentioned on a famous or authoritative blog.

However, this spells trouble if your website is under attack by black hat SEO. The sudden increase in backlinks can be indicative of the presence of irrelevant backlinks or even spammy backlinks on your website.

Google takes action on this by placing demerits on your website. This negatively affects your page ranking and your overall website health score.

If you monitor your website and notice this kind of problem early on, you can take steps to solve this problem. This way, you can avoid detrimental action from Google and better maintain your website’s health score.

Backlinks should come from legitimate sources

In case you didn’t know already, backlinks help your website by increasing your website’s visibility. You’ll want your website to appear only on legitimate sources.

And if I say legitimate sources, I mean sources that you’ve worked hard to earn. To get these sources, you’ll need to meet their standards for them to be willing to backlink to you.

You don’t want to get your hands dirty when gathering backlinks. These dirty tricks include spammy backlinks and manipulated links.

Spammy backlinks

Spammy backlinks are irrelevant links that redirect back to your website. These irrelevant links are bound to hurt your website because of the Google Penguin Update.

You might think that page ranking is a numbers game. This is correct, but only up to a certain point. When Google notices that your website links to tons of irrelevant websites, you’ll receive a penalty for it.

Link manipulation

Manipulating a link means buying or creating links to boost your website’s ranking. These links may not be relevant to your website and Google punishes you for this as well.

You’ll know a link is manipulated when you see it.

David McSweeney’s idea of bad links is a definitive source. At all costs, you should avoid getting and receiving backlinks from these sources. They’ll harm your website’s reputation.

You can hire link building professionals to pitch your website to other famous websites. In this way, you can be certain that your backlinks can be trusted.

Whenever you get a backlink that comes from a trustworthy source, you should work to maintain their trust in your website.

Credentials for your website are paramount

The last thing you want for your website is a red flag from search engines. This highly affects the credentials for your website.

The credentials for your website rely on your content’s relevance to the internet. Good SEO practice is a tried-and-tested solution for this.

Establishing good content requires knowing your audience. Knowing their keyword searches grants you an advantage in ranking higher in the SERPs.

However, spamming keywords in your content isn’t a good idea. This gets the attention of search engines and can spell trouble for you. Keyword spamming looks like this:

You can agree that the words “fire pit table” are all over the place. It was used so many times that it became “spammy”.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad if you place keywords here and there. It helps you rank higher in SERPs. However, saturating your content with keywords results in a negative user experience.

Providing your audience with content that is relevant to your website is a good practice to maintain search engine trust. Partnering this with keywords used in balance through your content will increase your page rank.

Conclusion

Your website is your identity in the digital world. You must protect your website from negative SEO by following this simple ABC:

Audit your website as often as possible. Keeping a tab on your website’s activity will give you warning that you may be under attack by black hat SEO techniques.

Backlinks should come from legitimate sources. Monitor where your backlinks are coming from and what they are about. Avoid using manipulated links and spammy links.

Credentials for your website are paramount. Providing relevant content increases your website’s reputation for both your audience and search engines alike.

Practicing white hat SEO is the best way to keep your website from being flagged. Add to that your practice of monitoring your website and you have the perfect recipe for a black-hat-proof website.

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