Negative SEO is basically when various techniques are used to try and damage your online marketing campaign. We’ve been noticing an increase in this kind of practise, mainly because Google penalises sites for trying to manipulate the search engines. It opens up opportunities to damage your competitors whilst improving your own businesses success online.
Personally it’s not something we support and think its a really nasty way of trying to gain success. As a business, if you employ the services of an SEO company, you might want to check that they aren’t doing this kind of thing, it can seriously give you a bad name!
How do I know if someone is targeting me for negative SEO?
Some of the things to look out for are:
- An unusual number of links being build to your website in a short space of time
- Lots of spammy links to your website
- Lots of new directory listings
- Lots of links appearing from the same IP address or website
- Lots of blogs/articles appearing with content that has been scraped from your website
For click fraud activity its a little easier to spot, you may notice your PPC budget being eaten up very quickly in the morning, or you might notice a sharp drop in enquiries despite gaining the same level of clicks.
If you believe that you have been targeted in some way and are unsure of how to deal with it, then do give us a call on 01279 647003 and ask for Neil, he’s more than happy to discuss a number of ways you can try to overcome this. We have fought and won a recent battle for one of our clients who were getting targeted, it took a few months. But their PPC budget is now being used by genuine prospects and the number of links being built to their website has now dramatically reduced. As a result we’ve seen an increase in search rankings, they are well on their way to retaining their previous positions before they were attacked.
Honestly, it’s not a quick process but it can be done!