7 Tips to Protect Your Site From Negative SEO by Aleh Barysevich #378

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebResults. I am Charles Lewis, your client results strategist. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. 378. 378. 378, yeah, it is 378. That is 378. After 377 and right before 379. As always, and usually digitally, we have a tip from our previous podcast. And the tip is, use paid clicks to support content promotion. After you spend the time writing that content, go ahead and invest some budget in the paying to promote that content. Maybe some boosted posts on Facebook. Maybe a sponsored tweet through Twitter with links to the content that you just wrote. That way, that bolstered budget can help promote your new content. Subscribe and follow. Boom. All right. So, please remember, we are filmed live here in Houston, Texas. Listen, Charles and I, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. And our mantra is... Do not be a douche. Do not be... It is not a good... It is very... Not a good look at all. So, we have kind of a dark, dark subject today. It's a subject that I actually don't know as much as I feel like you think I should know about the subject. And what is that? We're talking about negative SEO today. You know, that practice of, like, literally trying to decrease in rankings. Right? Who would do that and why they would do that and how you can kind of prevent that from happening to you. Punch in the face to Alay Barisiewicz and the good folks over at Search Engine Journal. Seven tips to protect your site from negative SEO. We'll get into that in a minute. All right. If you are in a position to have some sort of electronic device, maybe you're watching us on Facebook, you should, like, promote us or tweet us. What should they tweet? Tweet us. Use the hashtag SEOpodcast. This is number 378. Be sure to tag us in it, at eWebResults, at this SEOpodcast.

That way we can follow you back and do all of our social networking stuff. All right. So, if this is the first time you've listened to the podcast, howdy. Thank you for tuning in. Punch in the face to you. That is a good thing. And punch in the face to Marcus and you guys who are watching us live right now. Manny, I see you. Nolan, my favorite Davis. Thanks to all you guys who tuned in live right now. I don't know. We're going to have a Sammy Davis here at the office, so he might, you know, he might be dropping off on the favorite Davis list. No, he's still my top, at least my top three favorite Davis. At least, and I know a whole bunch of Davises. Like, my mom's maiden name is Davis. Okay. You know what I'm saying? You, like, have a lot of favorites. Yeah, and he's top three. Like, that's a lot, bro. So, so, yeah. That's awesome. If you've listened to this podcast before, then you know the segment that we're about to skip. And the reason we skip it, it really works this way. If we get ten shikos. Shiko, that's an eWebResults branded term for, like, social engagement. Stands for shares, likes, and follows. Shiko. If we get ten of those and we get a review, then two things happen. One, I don't get a tear tattoo under my right eye. And the other is, we actually don't go through the whole process of explaining to you exactly where to leave us a review. We got those ten shikos. We got those reviews. And so, we're going to skip that section. Yeah, I followed a lot of people back. Yeah. It's like 38 increase in Twitter. And TweetBit sucks. Just drop that out there. All right. As much as I use it, and that's a love-hate relationship with it, right? Because it's great in reference to, like, organizing columns from mentions to direct messages to just your regular stream. Right. But when you manage multiple accounts on

there, and our best SEO podcast, you know, it's kind of auto-tweeting. So, since it's doing that, I get a limit on who I can follow back from there. And so, once I follow five people, I'm done following for the day. It's done. It's just done. It won't let me follow no more than five people a day. So, you're just getting caught up with, like, five a day. So, the eWeb account is caught up. Right, right. No limit, right? But the best SEO, yeah, it probably won't ever get caught up because I can only do five a day. There is another option. You could log into the Twitter account and then do that. Yeah. All right. So, the woes of social media. All right. So, what we will do is tell you how you can connect with us. So, just to make sure that we don't cover the whole process of how to leave us a review, we're going to share with you our profile links on the platforms that we're on. And you can get to us and do what you need to do on, say, facebook.com slash. Yeah, shiko us when you get there at eWebResults. Twitter.com slash. eWebResults. Instagram.com slash. eWebResults. YouTube.com slash. eWebResults. And LinkedIn.com slash. eWebResults. eWebResults. All of that. I know I was ahead of time. We'll take you. You know that. Yeah. I couldn't hold that one in. That one was on its way out already. It came with song, too. All of those will take you to our profiles on those platforms. And make sure you shiko us. Yeah. Share, like, and follow. And like all the other stuff, like retweet, subscribe, and everything that's applicable to the platform you're checking us out on. Please do that. All right. If you're a PHP genius or a WordPress guru, we are probably looking for you. Go ahead and leave an audio resume, 713-510-7846. If you are interested in a free, comprehensive website profit analysis, go ahead and go to our website, eWebResults.com, and you'll see the green button. Fill

that out, and we'll get you that free, comprehensive website profit analysis. Let me drop this in there real quick. As you go to those platforms and you shiko us, keep in mind that we follow back. Right. And so we will reciprocate that same shiko. Yep. You will get value from that. And I heard we don't have AlgoCat today. No AlgoCat today. So I've just got a little bit of news. I had three little points on here. Google, you know, Google Drive, I use it. I don't use it as much as I should, actually, because I've kind of got into the Dropbox ecosystem, and we'll shift out of it because we're on G Suite. So we will shift out of it. It's just going to take me a while to get my head around shifting out of it. I love Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets. Yeah. All of that. Really good. Now they're going to actually be able to, so Google Drive will be able to back up and sync your whole computer. How cool is that? I sent that over to Javi because he's kind of in charge of backups and things like that. And he was like, well, that's just scary. Now they're going to have even more data. Yeah. No. Are you going to get ads based on what kind of icons you got on your desktop? Yeah. Kind of crazy. Oh, man. That would suck. Kind of. Yeah. It might be a good experience. I was looking for that. Thank you, Google. I needed that ad. So there's like, is there a difference between creepy and suck? Creepy absolutely suck. I kind of wanted to see those shoes or whatever, you know, whatever it may be. Marissa Mayer hates Yahoo Mail just as much as everyone else does. She liked it when she was working at Yahoo. No, she didn't. She was just saying that. She was trying to get that chick, man. I forgot to do the air quotes. Oh, you got to change the octave in your voice when

you say that. She liked it. Yeah. Back when she was at Yahoo. Actually, one of her tweets was, I'm so glad to get back to Gmail. It's so much easier on a platform I built. Because she was involved in building. And that's kind of cool. Yeah. A little cocky. That's why she didn't like Yahoo. It wasn't that it just wasn't her. She just didn't build it. Yeah. And then Amazon Wand. Have you seen this? Amazon Wand? So it really is. So they came out with a wand. Well. Like literally a wand? No, it's like a scan wand. So you can actually scan produce, not produce, but, you know, produce. Okay, it's an app. No, it's a scanner. A scanner. Okay. And it's got Alexa built into it. So it's a handheld, small little scanner. Alexa, you know, the whole thing. So are you walking through the grocery store scanning stuff, trying to find out where it's cheaper at? Well, no. No, because it has to work at your house, because it's got to be connected to Wi-Fi. Oh, so you're scanning stuff at home. Like, oh, throw this can away. Scan it. And so it's tracking to let you know. Order a place. And then you grab it and say, order my favorite white wine. I mean, they have a little video. And you've already scanned it. It'll be there in two days, right? I mean. Or depending if it's at the local one. It'll be there in three hours. Yeah. And it's free right now, because you pay 20 bucks for it, and then you get $20 credit towards your next Amazon book. Man, so put in the face to the technology companies, who are pushing the boundaries of the technology. Absolutely. Man, so my Kenfolk has the Gear 360 joint, the Galaxy 360 camera deal. Okay, yeah, yeah. Dude, I need one. I don't even know why I need it. No one has one. Hey. Hey. I need that. And I don't even know why I need it, but I just need it.

Because it was fun. It was like, it was following him around. It was doing this. It was like, and it was shooting in like a Super HD 4K situation. I was like, that's? I wish I needed it for a real reason. Yeah. Because then not only would I get it, I would also have stuff to do with it. To do with it, yeah. Now, if I get it, I'm about to probably go embarrass myself trying to make a video. But the technology was live. All right. So we had one contact. It came straight from one of our forums. Let's do that first. It's kind of a, it says, here's the message. Hi, guys. Your podcast is brilliant. Tell me where I can leave you a five-star review. We can't because we got 10 shikos and we got a review. ewordresults.com slash G+. All of the G+. That is where you can do it. I was researching HTTPS and understand the reason for it. A developer told me, we don't have to redirect the HTTP version of the site to the HTTPS and keep both running. We don't have to redirect the HTTP version to the non-secure version. You don't have to redirect the non-secure version to the secure version. And he asked, is that true? And we'll stop right there. That is not true. You need to redirect it. It ain't true. You don't have to. It works. But our recommendation is that you should. Since this is an SEO podcast, it is not true that you do not need to redirect them. Yeah, you should redirect them. Absolutely. It sounds odd to me. Then I found an article below, and he linked the list of the article, and the comments at the end worried me about people losing ranking big time when moving to HTTPS. Your thoughts on that. So, can you lose ranking when you redirect from HTTP to HTTPS? And we covered this probably three podcasts ago. We talked about it a little bit. Anytime you do a 301 redirect, there are

some estimates about there that you lose 5% to 15%. You can, not do, but can lose 5% to 15% of your link juice. Right? So, that's the value that's coming to your website. And that that is recoverable. Right? So, yes, it can impact it. You've got to just look at, you know, how much of your organic ranking is related to your outbound, inbound links. To your linking strategy. Right? Exactly. If it's mostly you've got great on-page stuff, and you really don't have that many links outbound pointing in, then it's probably not a big deal. If you've got decent content and a ton of links pointing to your website, good for SEO, then making that change might have some impact. And it could have a positive impact. Like, don't stand on the skate of fear. Because, you know, once Google made it kind of obvious that they were favoring sites that were on a secure server. And even if you do a search right now, I would bet money that half of the results you see organically are HTTPS. And so, with all of our accounts, we've moved to HTTPS. And, frankly, we haven't experienced any drops. Matter of fact, we actually got a couple pops from a few different clients. And so, I would encourage you to not be scared. What I would say, though, is, and we're going to get into how to look at links in a minute. What I would say is go check your links. This is a good time to maybe make some changes, disavow some things if you're going to do that. And I would also say go ahead and touch up your content just so once you do the URL redirect from HTTP to HTTPS and you resubmit it to Google, Google sees, you know, a new or secure site. They see some fresh updated content. And it's a cleaner link profile. And that way, you know, you have a less chance of incurring some sort of drop. Exactly. The other thing is potentially to have a pay-per-click

strategy behind that. So, be ready with that. Be ready to push traffic to your site. If you're spending a grand and you're getting lots of organic and you do get a drop, then maybe you've got to spend. Because I actually was talking with a prospect out of England. They do some really cool bright caliper stuff. And he had switched domains. So, this was not HTTP to HTTPS. Totally different ballgame. He's a sharp guy. So, I believe he got the 301 redirects. Obviously, a possibility that that didn't happen. But his ranking slowly came back. But he was like, man, when that happened, I was dumping money into PPC to keep my traffic. Keep the business afloat. So, yeah. That's a great question. Punch in the face to you. Your name is here on this list that I didn't get his name. I did not get his name. Kick in the shits to him. Punch in the face to you, homie. Nice guy. Yeah. Guy who got a redirect question. Yes. Great stuff. So, I had two pieces of news. All right. Two pieces of news real quick. Bing. Let's talk Bing for a minute. Okay. Do we have to? Yeah, we do. We do. Mainly because it's Bing ad related. And one of the things we do here is after campaigns are optimized and running well in Google, we'll import them into Bing. Right? Yep. And then try to max out there. Because the clicks are a little bit cheaper. Yep. And so, Bing ads is introducing in-market and custom audiences. Okay. So, they're catching up with Google's audiences. Right? Right. So, in-market, for those who are just wondering, that's not necessarily, well, they're in-market and custom audience. So, the custom audience, that's your remarketing list. Right. Google is calling it a remarketing list. Facebook is calling it a retargeting list. Bing is calling it a custom audience. Right? And it's basically anybody who visited your site before and now they've become part of your custom audience. Right. But then, they're also introducing in-market audiences. So,

that's like, so Google offers this also, but this is more like people who have searched and or participated online in an activity similar to what you offer. Right. So, maybe they didn't visit your pool cleaning site, but they did search for pool cleaning. They did have some questions about pool cleaning. Maybe they even purchased some pool cleaning supplies from some other online store and they were logged into Bing. And so, Bing knows that. And so, if you add pool cleaning to your in-market audience, then you will capture all of those people who took those actions. Right? So, shout out to Bing. We'll punch in the face to Bing for still playing catch up and actually catching up. Pretty cool. That's what's up. Last piece of news is Apple. Talk Apple Maps. All right. Yeah. You're not an iPhone user. I am not an iPhone user. I am now an LG. You say both with disdain or just confusion. Maybe it's not to say it's just confusion. You're an Apple user? An LG? Yeah. The pro Samsung over here. Galaxy, tab, phone, watch, all that. But dig this. Apple Maps. My laptop is a MacBook. Yeah. Just saying. And my desktop is Windows. You're feeling relatively agnostic to me. Hey, man. It's called balance. Yeah. One computer provided by work. That's one. And the other one is a preference I've had for like 15 years or something. So, Apple Maps adds. They're catching up with Google Maps also. Apple Maps adds the indoor mapping for malls and airports right now. Oh, yeah. And they only did like the big malls in the major cities. But they say they're rolling out like 30 different malls a month or something like that. So, that's just kind of cool. The thing that sucks about it, though? The thing that sucks about it, though, is that there isn't any directions given inside the mall. Like, you know, take 20 paces that way. Yeah, because it doesn't necessarily know where you're at because the GPS doesn't work inside the mall. Well,

according to the article I read, it will let you know where the story is and how you need to get there. Right. It just won't tell you the directions. Like, turn left at the panel or, you know, whatever it is. Right. And so, I mean, that's still kind of cool because at the end of the day, that would probably be a better experience than looking at the board. You know, the board that you're trying to figure out where it is. It's like, you are here. Where are you? Am I on the second floor? I just walked in from the garage. From the garage. I don't know, the garage, yeah. So, that's kind of cool. You know, you'd be sitting there looking at your phone like, I think I'm here. There are going to be a lot more people falling into fountains. Remember when you watched that? Yeah. I'm like, come on, lady. You didn't hear that water? Wow. Yeah, so that's my news, man. All right. So, and I have one more review. Okay. This review is from KShell99 from Canada. KShell. I like it. And this one is, of course, five stars. And I think it says, SEO style and substance. Charles, Chris and Charles are a lot of fun and run the most entertaining SEO podcast on the internet. I like that. Don't, but don't let the chuckles and giggles fool you. They fool you. They know their stuff. I'm chuckles, he's giggles. Every episode is packed with useful and actionable tips for the biggest marketing platform on the planet. The internet. I listen, yeah, this is awesome. I listen to an episode on my walk to work and usually have at least one action I can't wait to implement upon arrival. This is sounding a little familiar. Man. One power-packed punch in the face to these dudes, five stars. Oh, have we ever got a power-packed punch in the face before? Maybe that's the first. Yeah. Yeah. Unless I'm reading this one again, but I don't know. No, that's different. There was

someone else who talked about listening to it on the train. Right, right. On the way to work. And then they have usually an action item they can take advantage of. Yep. So hers was extremely similar. That's very cool. K-Shop, punch in the face to you from Canada. All the way from Canada. That's what's up. That is the potatoes of the podcast. It's time to get into the meat. Yeah, so like I said, punch in the face to Search Engine Journal and Ali Baricevich. This is his second article we've done by him this year. He posted this article. By the way, his Twitter handle is AB80. AB80. Y'all hit him up. At AB80AB80. Tell him, hey, at eWebResults is going in on your article right now. Yeah, those of you who are on Facebook, if you've got a Twitter account, go ahead and do that right now. Hit him up at AB80. And so he posted this article, the top seven ways to defend against negative SEO. All right. So negative SEO. Battening down the hatchets. We're putting up the wall, the fence, the whatever. Okay. What do you know about negative SEO? So negative SEO, like I mentioned earlier, I feel like I don't know. I certainly don't know seven. Or I think I don't know, right? Yeah, you might. There's things like, oh, yeah, I knew that would be detrimental. But I think of really the first thing that comes to my mind in terms of negative SEO is negative link building, right? So how do you go on to whatever horrible websites and point those and add links that point to your competition? Yeah. Let's say you're trying to bring down your competition. So you go to some porn site and you post comments with links to your competitor's website. Yep. That would be negative SEO. Yeah, just extremely douchey. Even saying that out loud. It feels like I need to go take a shower. Yeah, like I need to go rinse my mouth off for even knowing how to do that, frankly.

But yeah, great example of negative SEO. And then that's really what the bulk of it is. It's really negative link building has kind of had a biggest impact. He has some other ones in here that are pretty good. So Ali's definition, he says, negative SEO is the practice of implementing black hat SEO techniques on another site. On another site. He says, usually an SEO attack is unleashed by a disgruntled competitor or his or her minions with the goal of reducing that site's ranking. Matter of fact, he says, they play dirty. They may even bog down your website with hundreds of spammy links, flood you up with fake reviews, or just hack your website outright. He's right. And unfortunately, man, it's just something that you may have to deal with at times. It's an ugly thing to have to deal with, especially if you don't know it's coming. Like, you're like, why did my ranking drop? Why am I not getting any traffic? Why can't I be found anymore? Who the hell is all these people linking to me? Like, who is all these? It's been figuring out what happened. Exactly. You might not be fixing it. Exactly. So it's just a hassle to deal with. And unfortunately, there are douches out here who practice negative SEO. And so Ali is about to give us seven ways to defend against said negative SEO. Number one. He says, perform. What was your answer? You said links, right? His number one is perform regular link audits. Yep. Right? That makes sense. He says, regular link audits are good practice for any business, but they can save your bacon if you're ever the victim of negative SEO attacks. He says, if you suddenly notice a huge spike or drop and you haven't been working on link building, that should raise some red flags. He's absolutely right, man. Look, if you've been like consistently building links, right? Like for us, for example, with every marketing client, we try to build between two to four links every month, right? Consistently every

month. Build a decent link to the website. And so if you've been doing that consistently for over a year, then Google understands what your link profile looks, how it grows, and everything's good. And then all of a sudden you get a spike, 10 or 12 links, 15 to 20 links, 100 links maybe, or worse, you get a downgrade. All of a sudden people start disavowing links to you and start, you know, removing links to you, then you may have a challenge. And so you need to go and figure out why is this happening? Who is doing this? How can I change it? And so what I would recommend you do is first check. First thing you can do is check. Check which links are new and what hasn't been there. Right? What are the new links that people have acquired? Then go look at those sites. Are these sites legit or are these sites really the wrong site that I need to be linking to me? And go identify what's going on. How would you do that? Great question. So I prefer, I prefer Moz tool. They work with OpenSite, OpenSite Explorer. You go there, put your URL in, it'll tell you all of the links you have and write and if they're followed and if they're 301 or whatever that link diagnosis is. And so I would say do that, export that spreadsheet and then also log into Google Search Console and check your links there because technically those are the ones that Google sees and probably the ones that matter the most. So log into there and really compare what you export. You should see some similarities. Every time I do this, I always see some that are here and some that are there. But there's always some cross in between that both of them were able to catch. And so those are typically the good ones. Right? And so what I would say is check them and go ahead and start posting links into those sites. Go look at those sites. Go

run a link analysis. How does that site rank? How does his link structure look like? And then determine if you should keep that link or not. Versus case scenario, you disavow it. You tell Google, look, I didn't build those links. I don't want to have nothing to do with it. Please disavow it and go ahead and send off an email to that webmaster like, bro, please stop linking to me, you know, and get that off. And so that way you can, you have done your due diligence. But the key is being aware. Right? If you're not doing that audit, then you just don't know. And links could be killing your site negatively. Absolutely. I also use SEMrush. SEMrush is a good one. Great link. Yeah, it's a lot of tools out there. I just prefer Open Site Explorer and Google Search Console because they're probably some of the more accurate ones, I think. But like, check, Ahrefs is a good one. And I just drew a blank. But yeah, SEMrush and the others. But yeah, check those out and just be aware of who's linking to you. Right. It's just important to do. Number two. Number two. He says, keep an eye on your site speed. And we're talking the seven ways, top seven ways to defend against negative SEO. Interesting. Number one was perform regular link audits. Number two, he says, keep an eye on your site speed. He says, if you can't find anything and there's still a problem, you might be a victim of forceful crawling. You ever heard of that? I have not. So far, I have, but I didn't realize it was a form of negative SEO. Makes sense. Exactly. He says, forceful crawling causes a heavy server load, which means your site could slow down and might even crash. So this is like somebody submitting your site to be indexed. It's almost like a denial of service. It's like a low, we'll call it a low grade denial of service attack. Interesting. Yeah. So your site just getting so

much traffic, so much, and it's ghost activity, like bot activity. It's not even real visitors, but they're hitting your site so often that it's struggling to load. It's struggling to position to the point where, you ever been to a site before? And I literally got a full four and then it refreshed and the site came up. Immediately. Yeah. And so I know that was due to just too much traffic going to that website. That's a moment, yeah. And so keep an eye on your site speed. Like if your site's usually loading up pretty quickly and people are having a good experience, and then all of a sudden now it's dragging, now it's slow, now people are complaining, like sometimes it's not loading. Yeah, you could be the victim of a forceful crawling attack or somebody trying to do some negative SEO to your site. Either that or you made a recent update that's just not good, maybe an outdated WordPress plugin or whatever it is. But just keep an eye on your site speed. Make sure no one's proactively making your site slower. And this, okay, so can get very quickly into the territory of not negative SEO, which is if you're on a shared server and somebody else maybe has some of this negative SEO going on, or they've got a bad database connection or whatever it is. That's what, you're in that same neighborhood. Your website could just go to a crawl. Yeah, it's kind of like a neighborhood. Imagine a bad neighborhood, like kind of where you know I frequent sometimes. But just imagine something bad. Lots of potholes. Potholes, cracks, run-down houses, crack house over there, prostitutes over there, liquor store over there, just bad neighborhood. Right. And then you come build this amazing house because the land was cheap. The property was, yeah, the property was cheap. And so you come and build this amazing house. Or store, we'll say a store. Or even, but no one comes to your store because they don't like the neighborhood. Yeah. And so

building your site on a shared server, and in that shared server you have some porn sites or some people doing some spam or some other kind of non, some douchey activity going on. Right, right. Don't be a douche. Look, you're a resident in that neighborhood. Yeah. And so you receive that same, you know, or non-benefit, rather. So, yeah, keep an eye on your site speed. That's why we have our own servers. Our customers are, like, 90% of our customers are on our own servers because we know it's a limited number of websites that are on that server, and we've got control over all of those and, you know, have actually had, you know, noticed slowdowns and gone in and fixed database problems. So, yeah. Exactly. Number three. He says, search for scraped content. I hadn't considered this being negative SEO, but I could see how it could be. It certainly could have a negative. It has a negative impact on your site, right? He says, scraping is the process of listing content from your website and copying it verbatim to other websites. Usually, the attacker will claim it as their own in an attempt to beef up their thin content, but sometimes they'll combine it with a link form attack to spam your site. Scraping has serious consequences. If the copied content gets indexed before your content, then your page might be devalued. Yeah. Right? So, let's say you got some content marketing strategy. You spent a lot of time posting this content. You wrote this great article. You posted it on your site. And then, the same day you posted it, your competitor scraped it and posted it on theirs. And submitted it to Google. Yeah, they beat you to the punch. They submitted it to Google. They boosted it through Facebook. They got some activity there. And then, Google came and indexed your site afterwards. And Google said, hey. Why'd you scrape this? You got to do content. They had it first. Yeah. And so, now you begin to devalue for the same

content that you was trying to rank for. So, what I kind of wrote down here is really part of our process. Everything, every time we update a site with new content, every time a blog post is published, we resubmit. Immediately. We resubmit. Go ahead, Google. Hey, Google. Check out this new post. Hey, Bing. You might want to look at this. Sitemap gets updated. And that's my message to you guys. Anytime you post new content, just go ahead and take that extra moment and resubmit it to Google. Have them indexed. Go ahead and share it on Facebook. You know, four or five bucks and boost it. Let's just get it out there. That way you can claim it. This is your content. Matter of fact, I don't even know how true this is no more because I haven't seen much activity on Google+. But I know, like last year, posting content and getting someone to plus one it or plus it was almost more effective than even resubmitting it to Google. Because that was like almost a third-party verification that you wrote this content first. So the key here is whenever you're posting new content and even your existing content, man, go resubmit it to Google. Go have it re-indexed. Make sure your site map is up to date. Go and resubmit that. And so that way you're really taking the necessary steps, too, to claim your content. Because it probably will get scraped. It just happens. Number four. Number four. He says, monitor Google my business. We're talking the top seven ways to defend against negative SEO. Number four. He says, monitor Google my business. He says, unless you've made a big public PR blunder recently, then a whole slew of negative reviews might be a sign that someone is trying to flood your site with fake reviews. If you don't act fast, these can seriously damage your reputation. And we all know that reviews and five stars and that sort of activity has a direct impact on how you rank. And if you all

of a sudden get flooded with a whole bunch of one-star reviews and negative reviews, then, yeah, your ranking could devalue. You could not get that traffic because you don't appear to be the best result for the Google user. Now, he said monitor Google my business. I'll say just monitor review sites in general, whether it's Google my business, whether it's Yelp, whether it's Guild Control or Angie's List or wherever they're leaving these reviews at. Check your brand. Make sure that you're not getting flooded with just a whole bunch of negative reviews, right? And one of the easiest ways to kind of see them, they're usually one word, you know, like one star, and this word is like horrible or terrible or they suck or something like that. And nine times out of ten, the profile probably won't be a real profile image. Only one review ever written, recently created. Or either that or it's a profile and all of their reviews are negative, right? Like this profile is being used to just write negative reviews. In any case, you need to flag them and you need to, just like any other review, respond accordingly. That way you appear to do what you had to do, but then you flag it on the back end. So what you want to do, you got negative reviews that seem suspect, especially in Google, pull up your Google my business page, click on the review tab. You'll see all your reviews right there and you can flag them on the left side and report them as being fictitious reviews and then let Google handle it. Same thing with Yelp, log in, check the ones that aren't legit and then message Yelp and then they'll get back with you and determine if they're going to remove it or not. Now, you got a higher likelihood of getting it removed than Google before you do Yelp. Yep. It just is what it is, but at least you've taken the proper steps to do so. And it just kind of sucks, especially from

a search engine ranking perspective. Because when you consider Google, they're showing Google reviews and so, yeah, if you've got a whole bunch of one stars and you've dropped from about five star ranking to like a 2.5 or something, yeah, they're going to take you off the first page. And same thing with Bing. Bing shows Yelp reviews in their search results. And so, same situation there. You went from five to... I don't know how you know that. You went from five to one star review, then Bing is not going to show that listing because it's not the best, you know, it's not the best result for the Bing user. And so, check your reviews, be on top of it. You should be doing that anyway. Right. But definitely, if you find yourself losing ranking and you think you could be affected by some negative SEO, check your reviews. Well, if you're listening to this, you should come back to our website, search for this podcast if you get the drop, and then go through all of these notes. Yeah, because it could have been some links you built. It could have been site just slow in general. It could have been somebody duped your content and took credit for it. Or, yeah, it could be some negative reviews. Yep. You know what else it could be? Number five. Watch your keyword CTR. This is interesting. Your keyword click-through rate. Right? So, what he says is, look, a client site was getting thousands of hits that would land on a page and then immediately bounce. This began to have an effect on their rankings because the user experience is an important signal, and this looks like a bad user experience. He's right. I could totally see how a Google algorithm could make that justification. Absolutely. Like, this guy's getting tons of visits, thousands of visits, and everyone extremely high bounce rate. And go somewhere else. And go somewhere else. Somehow, the negative SEO-er is giving people a horrible experience when visiting your site. And they're not really

visiting your site. They're visiting the wrong site. And you're receiving the penalty for it. Yeah. Check your CTR. How are these clicks happening? How often are they happening? And this is a Google Analytics deal. So, you need to log into Analytics and just kind of go to, like, all traffic and then sort by Google Organic. And then you may want to add a dimension and look at keywords, even though they'll likely be not provided. But at least do that. And then you can start seeing which terms you're ranking for and the click-through rate for those terms. How many people are actually searching, clicking, and then making it to the site? Or how many are bouncing? Right? And so, understand what your CTR is. And if you see that dropping, even though you haven't made changes, the key is understanding that you haven't made changes. Right. Like, if everything has been going consistent, and then all of a sudden your CTR drops, hmm, I'm going to go look at that. Right. Figure out what's going on. Why did it drop? What changed? Right. Right. It could have been a number of these things that caused that CTR to drop. But you just want to be aware of that. You want to make sure you're showing up for the right terms. Right? Go do some searches yourself. And when you see your link show up, click it. You want to make sure that the right landing page is actually showing up, that the right experience is happening, because it may not be. And that could be negative SEO. Absolutely. Number six. Six. He says, check your SERP ranking. So, five was check your keyword CTR, basically seeing which keywords you rank for and how people are clicking through. Number six, he says, check your SERP ranking. S-E-R-P, search engine results page. Check your SERP ranking. And he says, a drop in rank might be the result of malicious intent. And so, this is, again, this is somebody. That's more like a result of negative SEO. Not necessarily

negative SEO. Yeah, this is after somebody hit you with a whole bunch of negative links and they've scraped your content and did all this stuff. And now your SERP ranking drops. Right? You need to be able to check that. And so, what I kind of added here was the same two places I checked for links. I'll go to Moz running a keyword ranking report and see, hopefully, you don't have a whole bunch of red down arrows. Right? Hopefully, you'll have a whole bunch of green up arrows. Right. If you have a whole bunch of them, like all your keywords are red down, then it could be a negative SEO or it could just be some problems in general. Right. But the key is understanding that. So, check Moz and then for your keyword rankings to get a better understanding of exactly where you rank at. But then, I'd also say check Search Console and look at your queries. You want to make sure that your queries, that your impressions are still going up, that your clicks are still going up for all of these different keywords. If you look at that query report and you see a peak, like a down drop, that's either a sign of an algorithm change or some negative SEO. And so, those are the two best places to check and see what your SERP ranking looks like. Other than, of course, you know, searching for all your target terms yourself, which may not give you the best results because you could be logged in and all this other stuff. Check Moz, check Search Console, check your SERP ranking. Make sure that your ranking looks consistent with how it's been looking the previous months. Number seven. Seven. This is the last one. We're talking the top seven ways to defend against negative SEO. Number seven was upgrade your security. All right? And obviously, this is a good one because a lot of people don't consider hacking a form of negative SEO. It certainly could. It certainly negatively impacts your style. Yeah.

They may not want to build links, so that's a challenging thing to do. It may be easier, especially if you've got some outdated WordPress site with some outdated plugins and a pretty experienced hacker. You can probably crack your site. And once he gets in, then he can just change his content. He got control. So it can negatively, you may do something like change a file. Right. We talked about that before. We had a client who actually came over and had his previous company just do some really negative things. Douchy is not even, yeah. What happened there is we got this new client. Man, this was a long time ago. So, and they're bigger, they had really good placement, right? They do communications here in Houston. So telephones and wiring, like low voltage wiring. And so, they came to us and they had good position. They weren't really happy with the communication, which is often the case for prospects who come over to us. They're not getting good communication with their agency, the previous company. So they come to us, we're like, yeah, we communicate, we give reports, we review reports, we have a monthly results call that happens every month. So we got them down this path. But they said, look, we're really concerned about, you know, what's going to happen. We just can't lose our place, placing, right? So we're like, don't worry, we're not going to change anything. We're actually going to start with this and we'll just do slow tweaks. And literally, like, on day 30, after we acquired the account, everything was off. It was like plus 51, if you're in Moz. 51 plus means that it doesn't exist. Past page five, yeah. It's gone. And we had, like, we spent, we probably was, like, you know, a little bit of time. We had a, like, maybe it was just something weird. But finally, it was like Friday, we're here kind of wrapping up the week with beers. And I was like, let me check the robot text file and got

into the robot text file. And they had said deny. So tell Google not to index the entire site. So then they, Google comes back and says, oh, you don't want me to index the site? Cool, we'll delist it. We'll just delist it, yeah. We undid that. Of course, send a note to the client. And it was probably, that was on a Friday. It was probably Monday. Monday, Tuesday, it was back up. Yeah. So, so, so, so upgrade your security. Yeah. Right, is what we're talking about. Because, matter of fact, he says negative SEO might not be all that common. But cyber attacks are on the rise year after year. Make sure your software is up to date. So, yeah, using WordPress, update that. Those plug-ins, update that. Maybe you got a whole bunch of old things still hosted there. Like, remove those if you don't use them. Move your site to SSL. Punch in the face to the question we had earlier. Now, all these are things you should do to update your security. Keep your site locked and tight. And that way, you can prevent people from adjusting your robots file to doing the things that will negatively impact your website. Like, I'm going to add one more. And this kind of, it's a little interesting. So, the biggest perpetrator on negative SEO is probably you. So, make sure you listen to the podcast. Make sure you. You're not out doing no bull crap. Yeah. Make sure you're not doing these things. You know, if the reality is, is you not. Yeah, don't be out there building links. Like, don't go pay 10 bucks to submit your site to a thousand directories. Right? Yes. You're going to build a thousand horrible links that will negatively impact your SEO. Don't jack content. Right? Don't go scraping some sites and duping content. Yeah, because you're going to negatively impact. Keep your site up to date. Oh, man. Right? So, that there's no holes into it. Right? That's... I didn't consider the fact that you could be

the negative. Right? Like... Yeah. So... Wow. So, like, know your stuff. And if you're feeling lost and you feel like maybe you don't know your stuff, then, you know, reach out to us. We're happy to help you. You know, eWebResults.com. This is one of the few times I've slipped in like a promo in the middle of a... Yeah. So, push in the face to you, man. Allie Baricevich. Great content. I love your content, man. The top seven ways to defend against negative SEO. I can dig it. Very cool. Do we have any what news? No what news today. No what news today. Except for the fact that, man, it's June in Houston. And, yeah, welcome to the summertime out here, man. Hot. Very hot. All right. So, if you like this podcast, we're going to ask you to do something really simple for us. And we're going to ask nicely. We're going to say, please... Yeah, please. Just share this podcast with, like, three people if you're watching right now. Three, preferably business owners who could benefit from, you know, defending against negative SEO or whatever their digital marketing challenge is. Share it with them. Tag them in it. Tag us in it. Appreciate it. And maybe you're listening because you're a business owner and you've got an internet marketing company. You've got some questions. You've got some concerns. So, you're figuring you're going to have to educate yourself. One, reach out to us. We'll let you know. We'll run that comprehensive website profit analysis. And two, share this with them, right? Yeah. You know, it's one of the reasons we stay on top of our own game is because we're doing this podcast and presenting the latest and greatest information to you. So, yeah. So, share this even with other internet marketers. And if you happen to be that business owner who's looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet... The internet. Call eWebResults for increased revenue in your business. Our phone number is 713-592-6724. Yep. If you

have a referral... So, we had a podcast listener last week send us a referral. We got a proposal to somebody. They just wanted stuff out. So, they did mostly local stuff. They wanted a national campaign. We got a proposal. When and if that proposal lands, so we got a good opportunity with that, then... And they pay us, then we are going to pay our podcast listener. It's a really simple program. Go ahead and reach out to us. We'll talk to you about that program. If you are doing networking in Houston, if you own a business in Houston, make sure you come to UpSocial Network. Go to upsocialnetwork.com. Register. Find the event next to you that's in your area. Register. Take advantage of it. It's a mind-blowing experience. This is like business networking times a thousand. It's a whole new ballgame. And if you're in the Houston area, you really want to get on a plane. Right now, we're loading up. We're on the runway. And UpSocial is about to take flight. And you really want to be involved. Yeah, absolutely. Get in on the ground floor. It is business networking at its best. We also are having a training, so we're making this free. Normally, as we grow, this training will be limited to only members. There is a free training on June 29th. So go to upsocialnetwork.com, and you can find out about that free training. It's going to be pretty impressive. I happen to know the trainer, right? He's a very good friend of mine and does some amazing work for Fortune 500 companies. So make sure you join us. And we did talk about growing your business, increasing your revenue. We have a program called Instant Leads. Leads, leads, leads. Guaranteed. T-T-T. And the reason we can guarantee it is really quite simple is that we know people are searching. By the time we get you on this program, we know people are searching for what you're offering. We're showing ads to those people who are searching for what you're offering, and

those ads reference the thing that they are searching for and have an offer and go to a page where they land, and that page references that offer. So they will reach out to you, guaranteed. Not all of them, right? We're not saying 100% click-through rate, 100% conversion, but we know that we would never even put the proposal in front of you if there wasn't enough traffic to make this work. Guaranteed. Reach out to us. Again, a good way to get that started. Just go to eWebResults.com and click the green button, and we'll get that free comprehensive website profit analysis for you. Please remember, we're filmed live here at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas, 77092. If you would like transcript, video, or audio of this podcast, you can get all of that at our website. Go get it. EWebResults.com. Transcript, video, audio, like the photo shoot we took earlier. You'll see the photo gallery there. There'll be some memes, which is kind of cool. Memes of like the tip, the sound check, freestyle, like all of that's there. Go, go, go, go absorb it. Go engage with it. Find all of that information. We are the number one SEO internet marketing podcast on iTunes. It was referenced in one of the reviews that we read today. That is because of you. Thank you so much for being great fans, for sharing the podcast with other people, for sending in questions, and for just being there. We're here so that we can support you. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. Bye-bye for now. Balance check, balance check, 378. SEO podcast 378. Chris and Chuck, feeling great. We're about to set it straight. Today, we're talking about SEO negatives. Punch in the face to Ale Barisavich. SEO podcast 378. Let's go. Subscribe. Follow. Boom. Boom.