If your site has been penalized for an act that your Seo hero did not do, then you are probably a victim of negative SEO. Not to be confused with blackhat techniques, negative SEO goes against all search engine optimization’s best practices as it intentionally brings a site down to the very bottom of search engine rankings.
It makes a site appear like it’s performing spammy behavior in an effort to boost rankings. In return, Google sees the spike in unnatural links as a red flag and penalizes the site.
Negative SEO is often done by creating a bunch of low quality, spammy links and have them point at your site. Once your site is penalized, not only is your SEO impacted but also your revenue.
All the hard work your Seo hero put in to ranking your site is gone with a little know-how from a competitor who wants to play dirty.
To prevent your site from being hit by negative SEO, below are the steps that your Seo hero must take:
- Set up Google Alerts on all topics to make sure you catch any attempts of negative SEO.
- Set up notifications for new links so you can catch malicious links.
- Check your site’s traffic daily. Watch out for spikes in traffic.
- Disavow the spammy links that don’t belong to you.
It takes a couple of weeks before links are disavowed. The best thing your Seo hero can do is be vigilant always by looking at any strange behavior in traffic and links.