One day you wake up and check your website traffic. Your rankings have plummeted overnight.
Your organic traffic is going down the tubes and your phone isn’t ringing.
What the hell happened?
Consider the possibility of a negative SEO attack against your site.
Thousands of websites across the internet are facing this now. Rivals, disgruntled employees, or random trolls are leveraging Google’s own algorithms to attack undeserving enterprises.
But here’s the thing.
You can protect yourself. This guide will show you how.
Common Negative SEO Attack Methods
An understanding of these tactics is your first line of defense.
#1 Toxic Link Building Campaigns
This is the nuclear option of negative SEO. Attackers create thousands of backlinks from the worst corners of the internet.
We mean spam links from gambling sites, adult content resources, and even pharmaceutical spam networks.
Those links will destroy your site. Sometimes these links can be added very quickly, hundreds of thousands of links in just a few days.
#2 Content Scraping and Duplication
You may know that the content is your digital fingerprint. Content scraping makes it difficult to determine who was the original owner and source of that content when someone copies and spreads your content everywhere.
Some sophisticated scrapers can use your web host and simply copy the entire website. They then publish hundreds of degraded version of your content with minor variations.
Duplicate content is a big no-no, Google’s algorithm recognizes this AND it starts to question how original your site actually is. At best, Google will consider you a copycat; at worst, they might assume you are stealing content from other sites.
#3 Sabotaging Local SEO With Fake Reviews
Scammers will use bogus Google accounts to give one-star reviews or suggest that your business is closed permanently.
Some scammers will even go further. Creating fake business listings with similar names to yours attempting to confuse local searchers and dilute your online presence.
#4 Hacking and Malware Injection
This happens when hackers take over your website and put in malicious code.
Visitors can be infected with malware or thousands of spam pages can created on your domain behind your back.
Google would crawl your site and find this malware or these spam pages, and mark your site as harmful. This is a big red flag for users that visit your site.
Traffic stops. Trust evaporates.
#5 Social Media Impersonation
Scammers make social media pages with your business name and logo. They write content that is really controversial or spammy that damages your brand.
This won’t necessarily hurt your SEO efforts directly, but it will impact negatively with the online presence.
Proactive Prevention Strategies
The best cure is prevention. Strong defenses built prior to an attack will save months of recovery effort.
Strengthen Your Website Security
Start with the basics. Always update your CMS, Plugins, and Themes. Require strong passwords and two-factor authentication for all admins.
Set up a web application firewall (WAY) like Cloudflare or Sucuri. They filter malicious traffic before it even hits the server.
Keep an eye on your site. Consider services like UpGuard or Visualping to notify you when your website content changes without any prior notice.
Establish Baseline Metrics
Document your current SEO performance. First, take a list your current rankings for target keywords (if any), backlink count, domain authority, traffic sources and tips.
This will serve as a baseline so you can measure the recovery progress.
Regular Monitoring and Alerts
Automatically monitor for the signs of trouble we talked about above.
Leverage the email alerts in Google Search Console for security issues, manual actions, and large traffic changes. Set up alerts for suspicious traffic in your analytics platform.
Use tools like Mention or Brand24 to keep track of all the brand mentions happening across the web. Which lets you quickly spot impersonation attacks as well as fake reviews.
Build Relationships with Quality Sites
If you have a good number of genuine backlinks, then negative SEO has less chance of hurting your ranking. Concentrate on getting quality links from the sites with high authority in your niche.
Create link-worthy content and guest posts to increase the authority of your site.
Document Everything
Record and monitor your work on SEO. Keep a record of all the new content you launch, all the technical changes you make and outreach campaign that you run.
This documentation can then be used as proof in case of a reconsideration request with Google, if needed. It goes to show that your ranking drop wasn’t due to anything you did wrong.
What If You Are Already Attacked?
Discovery is just the beginning. After verifying that you are being targeted, consider the following:
Stop the Bleeding
Cleared out any code that was compromised, eliminated the spam pages and patch security holes on your website.
If the attack included fake reviews, start taking screenshots of them now, before they are potentially deleted.
Disavow Toxic Backlinks
Disavow tool enables you to specify for Google to not take certain backlinks into account when assessing your rankings.
But use it carefully. Doing so could be quite damaging to your SEO if you disavowed good links from the past!
Export your whole backlink profile from Google Search Console. Export the data and review it methodically.
Look for obvious spam indicators like adult content, gambling sites, pharmaceutical spam, or sites in foreign languages unrelated to your business.
Create your disavow file. You can disavow individual URLs or entire domains.
Send the file through Google Search Console and wait. It can take Google weeks or even months to process disavow requests.
Contact Webmasters
Try to get the links for removal by reaching out to the webmasters of linking sites. When possible, Google prefers this over disavowing.
Create a standard email template explaining that links to your site were created without permission and requesting removal. Keep records of your outreach efforts.
Don’t expect high response rates. Spam sites generally won’t have contact information or may never respond.
Report Fake Reviews & Business Listings
On your Google Business Profile flag each fake review one at a time and give as much information as possible about why the review is fake.
Fake business listings created using your info? Report through Google Business Profile support.
Use the reporting system on each platform for fake social media profiles. All the good social networks are pretty anti-impersonation and will remove the fake profiles fairly quickly.
Takeaway
After fixing the issues, you will need to submit a reconsideration request with Google if your site has been manually penalized.
Be thorough in your request. Describe the incident and what steps were taken by you to correct those issues and furnish proof that you were under attack.
