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7 Tips to Protect Your Site From Negative SEO by Aleh Barysevich #378
Negative SEO attacks via spammy links, fake reviews, content scraping, and hacking can tank your rankings, and seven defensive practices including link audits, site speed monitoring, and security upgrades can protect your site.
Key takeaways
- Run regular link audits using Moz Open Site Explorer and Google Search Console to catch suspicious link spikes or drops early.
- Resubmit new content to Google immediately after publishing to claim it before scrapers can get it indexed first.
- Monitor Google My Business and Yelp for sudden floods of one-star reviews, flag fake ones, and report them to the platform.
- Watch your keyword click-through rate in Google Analytics; an unexplained drop could signal someone is artificially inflating your bounce rate.
- Keep WordPress, plugins, and themes updated and move your site to SSL to close the security holes hackers exploit for negative SEO.
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
About this episode
Negative SEO can tank your rankings, kill your link profile, and even take down your website altogether. Fix a negative SEO attack and protect yourself against negative SEO with this week's podcast: Negative SEO Attacks - 7 Ways to Fight Back!
Questions this episode answers
What is negative SEO and who does it?
Negative SEO is using black hat techniques against another site, typically carried out by a disgruntled competitor or their associates, with the goal of reducing that site's search rankings through tactics like spammy links, fake reviews, content scraping, or outright hacking.
How do you find and remove bad links pointing to your site?
Use Moz Open Site Explorer and Google Search Console to export your link profile and compare results. Review suspicious links, and if they come from low-quality sites, disavow them in Google Search Console and email the webmaster asking them to remove the link.
Can scraped content hurt your SEO rankings?
Yes. If a competitor scrapes your content and gets it indexed before you do, Google may treat your page as the duplicate and devalue it. The fix is to resubmit content to Google immediately after publishing and keep your sitemap current.
What should you do if you get flooded with fake negative reviews on Google My Business?
Flag and report the reviews as fictitious directly within Google My Business and let Google handle removal. Do the same on Yelp. Fake reviews often have no profile photo, were created recently, or show a pattern of only negative reviews across a profile.
In their words
negative SEO is the practice of implementing black hat SEO techniques on another site
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they may even bog down your website with hundreds of spammy links, flood Yelp with fake reviews, or just hack your website outright
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if you suddenly notice a huge spike or drop and you haven't been working on link building, that should raise some red flags
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Terms defined in this episode
- Negative SEO
- The practice of implementing black hat SEO techniques on another site, usually by a competitor, to reduce that site's search engine rankings through spammy links, fake reviews, content scraping, or hacking.
- Forceful crawling
- A negative SEO attack where someone causes excessive bot traffic to hit a target site, creating a heavy server load that slows down or crashes the site.
- Disavow
- Telling Google you do not want certain inbound links associated with your site, used when spammy or low-quality links are pointing to you and harming your rankings.
- Shiko
- An E-Web Results branded term for social engagement, standing for shares, likes, and follows.
Full transcript is being added.
This episode answers
Matthew Bertram
AI keynote speaker · Owner & CEO, EWR Digital · President, ModalPoint
Matthew Bertram is an AI keynote speaker, creator of DIG™ (Digital Information Governance), and owner and CEO of EWR Digital. He helps energy and industrial leaders win visibility in AI search (GEO and AEO), is President of ModalPoint and CMO of the Oil & Gas Global Network, hosts The Best SEO Podcast, and has authored eight books including LLM Visibility. More about Matthew Bertram.
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