Have you heard of negative SEO? Have you encountered negative SEO previously? I believe many people haven’t, yet it might be currently happening. The first time I know negative SEO exist is the year-end of 2014. At that time, I discovered my website, which was ranked steadily on the first page for one year, had slipped in ranking. At that moment, I began my SEO learning journey.
I cannot express how much I hate negative SEO, it really exists and at the same time, I cannot prevent it. I guess my competitions are highly unethical with a twisted mind. It is like when my competitors know that they can surpass you or they wish your ranking to slip below them, they will use bad links to attack your website, and cause your website ranking to drop and disappear from sight of your audience. My website had received a lot of negative links since September 2014, their anchor text is: sex, sexy, payday loan, … and there were four to five other companies are victims of similar attacks. After that, our company websites’ ranking begins to fall. However, it is only my website which suffers most. (Now I have given up on the website). Although I am very angry, there are no other ways to prevent this from happening, after disavowed these links, the ranking is still very difficult to climb back up and need time to recover. Think of it as a sickness and it takes time to heal. And some other never recovered.
So, why do I want to write this article? The reason is because after observing this for such a long time, I discover that this year (2016) has negative SEO happen again. It is not happening to my website, but people from my industry (ranking first page). Anchor text is Money keyword, and their external categories are all article links. Despite the fact that it appears harmless at first glance, it is actually a type of chronic poison. I have shared this situation with a few friends of mine who are working on SEO, yet, they say that these are just normal links. Thus, this type of negative SEO can easily trick many people. Anchor text sometimes is sensitive. The more you want some keywords, the less you should use it as anchor text; it will draw Google’s attention to think you are purposely doing this. Doing so will lead to a poor ranking for that keyword.
So, how can a person minimize their loss? Below are some of my views regarding to this:
After my observation, a new website with high ranking and few inbound links are the targets. I remembered that my previous website had a lifespan for three years, with fewer than 100 inbound links, and ranked No 5. It was a spectacular result. For others in the same industry as me, they exist for a longer period with thousands of inbound links; hence, their impact is not so significant.
1) The quantity and quality of inbound links are both very important; it is excellent if you have few inbound links and able to make it to the top of the rank; however, if Negative SEO happens to you, you will be impacted. So I recommend you to take your some and slowly build your inbound links but avoid spam links.
2) Once you discovered negative links, please do not wait but disavow.
3) When negative inbound links happen, do not panic! Do not panic! Do not panic! It is important that I have to stress this for three times. You must create high-quality inbound links. How high should the quality be? Well, it is better to have DA in the range of 60 or above. You should also use anchor text for your company’s name and keywords (e.g. Novage provide SEO website design.)
4) Prevention is always very important. So you should try to take the time to build up your brand. Use social media to begin with. When Google always trusted your brand, it will weaken the power of those abnormal inbound links.
In here, I would like to warn those people who are doing SEO right now to stop being a crook. If you use Negative SEO on others today, people will do the same thing to you in the future. Everybody’s effort will be undone. So please leave SEO in peace. Find out our SEO service from here.