In a continuing effort to update everyone on the unfortunate power of negative SEO, here are some of the known strategies that have been used in an effort to reduce a competitor’s Page Rank. Before we dive right in, though, it is important to remember that these are listed as a means of educating you so that you will be better prepared to prevent such attacks. That being said, let’s take a closer look at these “lovely” methods employed by unscrupulous others.
Content Scraping – For those who aren’t clear on the process, search engines like Google only crawl your site once every so often. While you may have some degree of say over this, there is no sure way to speed up the process. When you post new material to your site, there is bound to be a degree of delay between your upload and time at which your new material is indexed. Those who scrape content will seek to undermine you by copying your new content and posting it elsewhere in an attempt to have the search engines index their copy first making yours appear to be spammed content. In order to protect yourself from this, it is important to update your sitemap regularly. The sooner your sitemap is updated after new content is loaded, the less likely it will be that your content will get compromised.
Paid Links – If a few links pointed at your site is a good thing, then thousands of incoming links should be awesome, right? Wrong! If your site has a myriad of paid backlinks coming in from many sources, then you could soon find yourself on the wrong side of Google’s tracks. In fact, sending thousands of paid links to a competitor’s site could easily sink their boat. The unfortunate effects of paid links can only be offset by identifying links that are not within your control and submitting a reconsideration request to Google to try and get these tossed.
Slow Site Speeds – If your site is being crawled excessively, then it could be slowing down severely. There are several malicious site crawlers out there which brings up the question as to whether you can block them without hindering Bing or Google from legitimately crawling the site. If you know both services’ IP addresses you can allow them access to crawling your site while keeping the others blocked.
False Reviews – Some people fall into the trap of thinking that the more reviews you have the better off you are. To this end they decide to load up with a ton of fake reviews in hopes that their site will rank better. Trouble is that this can also raise red flags with Google. If your competitor is so inclined, it is not difficult to put up hundreds of fake reviews in hopes that your Google Places listing will be flagged. Keeping up with where you reviews are coming from and reporting issues to Google as soon as they are caught are the two most effective methods of dealing with this sort of attack.
While these four may not represent all the potential methods of attack, they are usually the most commonly seen. As such, knowing how to prevent or rectify their outcomes is of the utmost importance. Letting others get the best of you through the use of Negative SEO is something that can certainly be prevented with an ounce of know-how and proper motivation.