How to Protect Yourself from Negative SEO Attacks?

Updated October 6, 2023
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Search-engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective ways to promote your business online. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most effective ways for your competitors to undermine you.

So-called negative SEO attacks take the strategies that work so well to market your business and use them against you. Instead of building up quality backlinks to your site, your competitors will buy bad links pointing back to your site, bringing down your page rank and your position in the search results.

You can protect yourself from negative SEO attacks by taking some preventive measures. Here’s what you can do:

Check Your Link Profile Regularly

A negative SEO attack can happen at any time without you knowing it. Your traffic will start to slow down, and you’ll check your analytics only to see dozens or even hundreds of spammy links in your dashboard. You can make sure these links don’t irreparably harm your site by checking your link profile regularly to learn about problems as soon as they begin. The sooner you take action, the quicker you can restore your site.

Remove Bad Links

As soon as you spot negative links directed at your site, take action. Contact the site owners and ask to have them removed. Make a list of the links and send Google a request to disavow them. The links will still be pointed at your site, but Google will not consider them when evaluating your site for page rank or search position.

Build Good Links

When evaluating your site, Google and other search engines consider your whole link profile, not just the negative links. You can minimize the impact of a negative SEO attack by building a high number of good links to high-quality sites in your niche. The more quality links you have pointing to your site, the smaller impact the negative links will have.

Employ a Good SEO Strategy

One of the best ways to defend your site against attacks is to simply build a strong site. If you are doing everything else right for your site, then it won’t matter if you have spammy links pointing back at your site. Incorporate a strong keyword strategy, optimize your photos and graphics, and create great content. If you do all that, you’ll naturally attract quality links and you’ll make your site naturally invincible to negative SEO attacks.

Negative SEO attacks are a real threat. Any competitor can spend a few bucks and direct hundreds of low-quality, spammy links back to your site, bringing down your page rank and your position in search results. However, if you monitor your analytics regularly and take steps to build quality links and employ a strong SEO strategy, you will make your site strong against any attempted attacks.

Do you have a strategy for dealing with negative SEO attacks? Has your site been the victim of a negative SEO attack? Share your tips and strategies in the comments!

Author Bio:Bridget Sandorford is a freelance writer and researcher for Culinaryschools.org, where recently she’s been researching the best culinary schools in usa. In her spare time, she enjoys biking, painting and working on her first cookbook.

3 comments

  • Syed Danial @ DasHingHub

    Sometimes people don’t know why their website traffic is going down. One of my friend is facing such problem his traffic stats are decreasing every day and me and even he is unable to know the reason it is not negative seo that is confirmed

  • Abhishek

    Thanks for your info. After reading two articles on negative SEO, I have understodd it.

  • Bibika@UK SEO Consultancy

    Negative SEO is something that has been developed as a term recently, after google introduced the Penguin and it took them several months to understand that this may become a common problem so they introduced a way to report links that are not actually made by the websites webmaster, through webmaster tools. That way Google will ignore those links. It is helpful, but still, if you haven’t done checking or noticing any new bad links – you’ll still be punished

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