TACTICS OF NEGATIVE SEO

Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the visibility in the search results and getting the traffic from free or natural listings. Negative SEO is the complete opposite of SEO. The aim of negative SEO is to bring down your website in the search engine rankings. Competitors target your website and can affect your rankings by developing bad backlinks and using negative SEO tactics.

Negative SEO Tactics

Following  are  some  of  the negative  SEO tactics  that  your  competitors  can  use  to  bring down your  website's   ranking  on  search engine  results.

1.Paid Linking: Some of the websites which buy and sell links in order to pass page rank is a violation of Google's quality guidelines. Google announced to all webmasters to remove the paid links. The links which you have no control over or unsure about, submit a reconsideration request about all those links.

2.Stealing Content before it gets Indexed: Whenever a new content is added to your website, it is not indexed immediately. Your competitors can steal your content before it gets indexed. You can avoid this by updating the sitemap and re-submitting consistently when the new content is published in your site. You can identify whether your content or site is being duplicated by other websites or not by performing a Google search containing sentence of your page within quotes.

3.Fake Reviews: Competitor can add fake reviews to a business listing and it seems to be as if it was created by you. You can prevent this by making sure to monitor the reviews and use Report a Problem link so that Google can notify about all such reviews.

4.Site Speed: If your website is getting crawled then your site can experience loading problem. You can prevent malicious crawlers from having access to your site and allow reliable crawlers like Google, Bing to access your site. For identifying and stopping bad crawlers knowing Google and Bing's IP addresses will be useful.

5.DCMA Removal Requests: After monitoring the most valuable backlinks, a competitor can send email to the webmaster that the link to your website is causing copyright infringement and it should be taken down. You can avoid this by establishing a relationship with the website and email them thanking the sites.

6.Monitor your Backlinks Profile: Monitoring your backlink profile plays a crucial role in finding your competitors using various tools like Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer for generating quality backlinks.

7.Monitor Your On-site SEO Activities: Apart from monitoring the backlinks your site is receiving, your competitors can also get the information about the press releases, social media optimization etc. You can check frequently on your competitors to see whether they are using any strategy to pull down your website from SERP.