Negative SEO does exist and can impact your site’s performance on Google. Spam links, unnatural anchor text and missing content from your website are all evidence that you might be a victim of a negative SEO attack. While it’s difficult to avoid an attack since you can’t control what other people are trying to do, but it’s not impossible to be protected.

Today we’ll focus on what really is negative SEO and what you can do if you are targeted by one.

What is negative SEO

Negative SEO is when people use an unethical attack to harm a competitive website’s rankings on Google. Here are some of the ways your site can be attacked:

• Creating fake profiles of your company
• Hacking into your website to delete content or add malware
• Building bad links to your site

Negative SEO can have a big and bad influence on your website since Google’s algorithm can’t always tell the difference between a normal decrease in traffic or negative SEO which is forcefully destroying your website’s traffic. Nowadays, a lot of companies hire professionals in order to help them deal with their competition. Although not the best possible strategy, negativeseoexpert.com stated that a lot of people are looking for their services, so that they can boost their website as much as possible.

How do you know if your website has been attacked by negative SEO?

Google Analytics.

You will need to go to Google Analytics and open up your website. From there go to Acquisition and click all traffic. If you see any major decrease in traffic you may have fallen victim to negative SEO.

Google Webmaster Tools

Login to your account and go in Open Campaign, from there into search traffic and search queries. You will get a graph of all your website’s traffic. Go through all this data and check if there are some unnatural and weird changes to the traffic.

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What you can do against negative SEO

If you didn’t take any measures to protect yourself from negative SEO and is already causing harm to your site, you should follow these steps to save what you can.

• Find the bad links. An older website will usually have a big list of backlinks, so it’s nearly impossible to search through all of them and find which ones are the bad links. There are online tools that can help you automatically find all the bad and unnatural links on your website.
• Disavow those bad links. After you have found all the bad links make sure to upload all these links into the Disavow Tool. This tool will send all this information to Google’s algorithm to discredit all the links you have gathered.
• Data organization. Organize all the data you have collected from tools such as Google Webmaster Tools, Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer, and Ahrefs. Then paste all the data into sheets and make sure you remove all the duplicates from the sheet, so you have only one URL link.
• After disavowing all those bad links you still are not out in the clear. You must contact the domain webmasters and ask them to remove these bad links.
• If you want to quickly find the contact information of a webmaster you can use the Rmoov tool. It will provide you with all the necessary contact details you need.

Being a victim of a negative SEO attack is certainly something scary, but if you’ve read through this post then you are ready to handle if you suffer from an attack like this.