We have already talked a lot about SEO in this blog and it goes without saying that it is one of the best tools to position your brand in Google, but not everything is happiness, because if used incorrectly it can become a lethal weapon for many websites, including yours. For this reason, if you own a business in Miami and you have a website that you do not want to be in the last places of Google searches, it is important that you learn how to detect negative SEO, how? Cute Digital Media tells you how.

First, let’s get out of doubts and define what negative SEO is

If you have noticed a strange behavior in the web development of your page, you have seen that traffic has decreased and Google has penalized you on several occasions and you do not know why, you probably have negative SEO, this in a nutshell is a very unethical technique that certain people use to affect the performance of websites. But… How do they manage to affect your page? Well, there are 3 ways:

1.      Your website was hacked

When we talk about negative SEO, the first thing you think about is that your website was hacked and you’re right, since it’s one of the most used techniques to affect the performance of your content.

You usually know that your website has fallen into the hands of a hacker when you notice that it is totally unbalanced, becoming very slow and losing rankings.

2.      They created fake links on your website

If you are browsing your website and suddenly you see several strange links in which you enter and find nothing, this is already a clear sign that you have negative SEO. And thanks to these famous backlinks can cause you to immediately lose organic traffic to your page.

3.      Copy your content to another website

These people know perfectly well how to attack your SEO positioning, for this reason they know that Google can penalize you if it discovers other web pages with your same content, that is to say they create several websites very similar to yours, thus making the search engine send them to the last places. Don’t fall into the trap! If you discover that they copy the content of your website, don’t wait a second and report them to Google.

Now, how to detect negative SEO?

When your website is being attacked, most of the time you don’t realize it, for this reason it is important that you periodically review the content and performance of your website, if you notice any of the following failures is because it is time to do something about it and eliminate the negative SEO.

1.      Your traffic starts to decrease in a surprising way

If for a long time you’ve had the best organic traffic of all and suddenly it starts to drop drastically, you’re probably having negative SEO, but don’t worry, we have the solution! In this case we recommend you to use Google Search Console, a tool that analyzes your traffic levels and tells you what is affecting your performance. It will be your key ally to determine if you are being the victim of a negative SEO attack, as it allows you to link to your website pages identified as spam sources in order to disable those links. Another alternative is Semrush, its functions will help you identify inbound links to the web and the quality of them.

2.      The Keywords of your website no longer have positioning

If you did the best job looking for the perfect keywords for your business and you notice that after a while they don’t work the same and lose positioning, it’s because negative SEO is directly affecting your keywords.

Here you can continue to use the Google Search Console tool, since at the time of detecting what alters your organic traffic discovers what keywords are being affected, so you can eliminate the negative SEO before you fall into the risk of losing your website.

3.      Your URLs are weird

Sometimes the negative SEO directly attacks the URL of your website, generating false parameters in the same, in this way makes that when users search for you on Google you can not find you. To prevent this from happening to you it is good that you generate a domain of your website with a reliable provider, so your URL will always be protected.

4.      Beware of Spam links!

If you find very strange links on your website and you notice that they do not relate at all to your brand’s content, it is more than certain that you are being affected by negative SEO, because if you have spammy links you will not be able to get your website ranked.

And as there are tools for everything, there is Open Link Profiler, in which you can find the damaged links on your page and see which domains are damaging your website, so you can change these links in time and improve your positioning.

5.      Identify a total hack of your website

If your website is achieving the best organic positioning, has become a reference and everyone knows it, it is likely to appear several enemies who want to affect your content, and we assure you that they will look for ways to hack your website, making it slow, losing traffic, links fail and be in the last places in Google.

Therefore, it is important that you protect your website and to achieve this there are tools like WP Scans, McAfee Security Scan Plus or PandaActive Scan, which detect the negative SEO of your website and protect it from intruders.

How to prevent negative SEO attacks?

We can’t prevent an SEO attack of this type, but we can make sure that its consequences are as minimal as possible if we detect it in time. The best way to avoid losing positions in Google’s ranking is to do a good monitoring of your website:

• Check your content, links and loading speed frequently. This way you’ll quickly detect if there’s a problem.

• Activate Search Console notifications, so this tool will inform you periodically and you will be able to check if there is any incident that requires your attention.

• You will make your website a little safer from this type of threat if you don’t use the default URLs that CMS’s usually use for administration, there are plugins that can help you with this.

• Remember to use strong passwords that include uppercase, lowercase, numbers and symbols, and change them regularly.

Negative SEO is an unpleasant reality that can catch up with you at any time. The best way to defend yourself is to increase your site’s notoriety through social signals, interaction and satisfied users. The more useful your website is; the less likely Google will penalize you if they attack you with Negative SEO.

Do you need professional help to improve the SEO positioning of your business? At Cute Digital Media we have the ideal platform to improve the organic positioning of your website through effective SEO strategies. Get quality traffic with keywords and links to take advantage of your content with our advice, contact us today!