Understanding Negative Seo

By Author: Guria Norland
Total Articles: 11
Comment this article

One of the first things site owners blame for their failing ranks is negative SEO campaigns. Whether it’s true or not, it’s a conspiracy theory that’s easier to understand than finding out why your site is losing its popularity. It’s like negative ad campaigning among political candidates. For the losing candidate, it’s easier to stomach that someone has been sabotaging their electoral campaign rather than actually losing the election.

But sometimes, like a lot of conspiracy theories, negative SEO is real. And they are the actual reason some sites are unsearchable or were penalized with a low rank.

Definition

Negative SEO isn’t a new trend in the SEO world. It has been happening for as long as snakes are existing in the forest (no offense to the snakes but what it just means whether in real time or virtual, there are bad elements that instead of rising cleanly, they’d rather pull you down).

Negative SEO, as negative connotes, is a wicked way of ruining your site’s ranking. Comparing it to political campaign, they’ll throw things at your site to make you look bad, like you’re ...
... sleeping with your intern or using campaign funds to fund your mistress’ lifestyle or your daughter is actually granddaughter, nasty things like that.

Technically SEOmoz defines negative SEO as, "they've hit you with a ton of low-quality or clearly black-hat links across a large number of domains."

By definition, if your site has been hit by negative SEO, it means you’re actually doing quite well enough to be pulled down by your competitors. So convenient or not, good for you, congratulations.

Types

One simple type of negative SEO is security breach in which something has taken down your site. The other is revising something in your content or having strange outbound links. Although they’re quite serious too, they are easier to handle.

One of the more complicated types are the link-based attacks. The thing about this is that, sometimes curing it can make things worse. By pulling out those links like weeds in your garden, you’ll be spending so much time and money doing that. Granted that it’s really a negative SEO attack, you’ll be expending too much effort on this instead of building up your site.

The serious type of negative SEO is a strange occurrence of low quality links that came from different kinds of root domains. Dr. Pete in his blog for SEOmoz entitled Were You Hit By Negative SEO?, “Typically, you’ll also see a sudden spike in these links… When you see massive, unexplained growth in low-quality links, then you may have a problem.”

Solving It

One solution is employing the use of tools to get a view of your link profile. There’s Google Webmaster Tools, Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO and Bing Webmaster tools. These have the capability to trace the historical data of your links, although Dr. Pete reminds rises in links happen all the time. “You’re looking for a clear pattern of malicious links.”

But just like any negative ad campaign, you can only do so much. Using the political ad campaign scenario again, you can keep explaining the negative publicity thrown at you, but the people, just like Google, will still look at your track record.

Keeping clean, maintaining a good image, hooking with high quality links, these are the secrets of thwarting negative SEO.

Professional SEO Company OptimizeX ranks your company with Professional Arizona SEO Services. Make your company an industry leader with OptimizeX Professional SEO.