Did you notice a sharp fall in your SERP rankings? Is your web traffic starting to dwindle for no explainable reason? If you answer both questions with a yes, then, you can blame a competitor’s potential negative SEO attack.
The following are some of the most negative SEO tactics to avoid and you should always watch out for to prevent dire consequences:
Producing Duplicate Content
If you want search engines to consider you as someone credible and you wish to snag top spots in SERPs, the first and most important thing you have to do is create original content.
Once this originality is gone, you can almost expect a downhill turn for all those pages you made with such hard work and effort.
When you become a victim of this negative SEO attack, your content will be scraped and duplicated before it gets reposted on other websites, making it lose its originality along the way.
Google will then be forced to filter similar pages and decide which would rank. Sadly, the original one doesn’t get ranked at all most of the time.
Rolling Out Toxic Backlinks
Every time you use good quality backlinks, Google takes it as a sign that the linked website is something that has earned people’s trust enough to make them recommend and vouch for it to their peers.
Toxic backlinks, however, have the opposite effect. These links come from unreliable spam websites, link farms, or websites without any relation to the linked content. The main objective of this negative SEO tactic is for your site to be penalized by Google. Or worse, they might even go as far as removing all the positive backlinks you have.
Fake Profiles in Social Media Platforms
Carefully maintained and legitimate social media handles can improve brand awareness and promote a more positive reputation for your business.
One way to damage the credibility of your company is to come up with fake profiles using your name and exploiting them in the hopes of hurting your online presence.
These fake profiles can then be used for spreading fake news, spam, and false information. These can also be used in other ways that might make your brand earn a bad impression among people.
Spread of Negative Reviews
Businesses that are active online in today’s digital era know all too well how a single bad review can ruin the reputation of an entire company.
Just imagine being the target of an attack that involves posting several negative reviews online. Practitioners of this negative SEO tactic might also end up flooding negative reviews on your social media profiles, seller pages, and website.
Website Hacks
While this last one happens to be the trickiest and most expensive way to hurt the search rankings of a website, it is also unfortunately one of the most effective and, thus, also the most damaging.
Since the fastest way to boost SEO is to directly make positive changes to the settings, layout, or content of a website to make search engines love it, the best and easiest way to hurt the SEO effort of the same site is to make several on-page changes to attain the desired results.
Make sure to keep an eye out for these negative SEO tactics to avoid your website to stay safe from their harsh consequences.
