For the longest time a lot of SEOs would have told you that negative SEO is a myth. Unfortunately the once thought to be rumor has been proven to be true.Today the modified Google search algorithm has made many websites vulnerable to negative SEO. After introducing disavow links tool on Google webmasters tool, your competitors use another tactic which is more effective. Everybody used to spam your website to outrank it. Now they do differently. Your competitor buys site wide links on a high PR website using your important anchor text and then gets your website penalized in less than a month. If someone attacks your website , what do you do?
And what are some preventative strategies that can be used to avoid or catch negative SEO? A lot of people today are curious as to whether or not Google is aware of this, and possibly giving the power to these larger more dominant sites intentionally. While I can’t say that either way, I can say that it seems for those sites that are getting hit with negative SEO and attempting to contact Google for assistance are rarely getting responses of any kind.
So how can you tell if you and your site are getting hit by negative SEO and are the target of shady business? First of all you may notice a sudden drop in the search engine rankings, and this will be typically being on a page to page basis. You may notice one or two keyword targeted pages dropping a notch or two for no apparent reason. Next you will see all of your pages gradually falling over time, and you will seem to have no power over what is happening.
Another sign may be a dramatic decrease in traffic all of a sudden, and at the same time you will note that you have not been changing methods or trying anything new. It can all just seem to come out of nowhere. You may also be able to track your inbound links and find they are coming from several dodgy sites that you have no recollection of linking to. If that happens consider yourself under attack and take immediate action.
There really is no proven method to find out who the attacker is, it’s going to take you due diligence and a lot of hard work, basically you will have to stay ahead of the negative SEO power mongers who are attacking your site.