Negative SEO refers to using Black Hat Search Engine Optimization on third-party sites to get Google to punish them. It can also include altering or disabling a website’s SEO properties to reduce its effectiveness.

It is important to learn how to avoid negative SEO attacks and to be able to identify them. If your website all pages are not showing up on Google and you are wondering why is google blocking my searches that may be because of this too.

Negative SEO techniques can be difficult to deal with many of them are beyond our control (such as bad links pointing at our website).

Types of  negative SEO attacks:

Negative Off-Page SEO

The negative off-page SEO is a form of SEO that attacks your website, without affecting its internal structure. These types of attacks are usually based on the use of Black Hat SEO or negative link-building techniques.

However, they can point to your website at other times and resort to other content-related methods.

Link farms

A collection of web pages that are linked to one another on the internet is called link farms. Google will penalize you if your website contains many links from unrelated websites.

These SEO negative attacks include buying or creating link farms, and linking them to your site to Google penalizing them.

Copyright claims

It is a person reporting to Google that they have published material on your site that belonged to them. This causes your page to be removed for a maximum period of 10 days.

Fake duplicate content

This is copying and pasting your content on other web pages. You may also use the link farms described above. This was a common Black Hat SEO technique before Google began to crack down.

Modifications in the SEO configuration

Let’s face it, you are unlikely to notice if someone changes your entire alt text to make it less efficient. Truth is, not much. This technique uses to modify the SEO configuration of pages that may go unnoticed but can hurt their positioning.

Modify redirect

Search engines consider error pages to be bad. Websites that redirect to bad pages are not usually penalized severely. However, if your redirects become altered, disabled, or scrambled, you could find yourself in the rankings without even knowing why.

How to avoid negative SEO

is the first step to protecting your website against negative SEO. This allows you to identify signs of attack such as sudden drops in organic traffic.

It is easy to spot this if you monitor your traffic using Google Analytics. You can also create an email alert in Google Webmaster Tools.

This will allow Google to email you if your website isn’t indexed or suffers from a manual penalty. The sooner you find out, the quicker you can respond and minimize the damage.

Search Console allows you to locate harmful and undesirable links

Another way to determine if your website is being attacked by SEO is to analyze the links that point to it. You may notice many links pointing at your page, which do not add value to your site or have an origin that you don’t recognize, and you don’t remember having included.

This is a sign that someone is trying to attack your website. Google’s Search Console can help you to disavow them.

Make sure you are reviewing your SEO settings

Regularly reviewing your SEO configuration is crucial as this will allow you to detect any changes on your website that may be caused by a negative SEO attack.

This includes checking your robot.txt and random inspection of the internal encoding of its contents. (headers, alt images tag, etc.

Strengthen security

To be able to alter another’s website, every hacker needs administrator access. Adding additional security levels can greatly reduce the chance that they can get into your website.

And if you are still not sure if your website is affected by negative SEO or not. Contact us for a detailed audit of your website.