Myths and Facts About Negative SEO

Although negative SEO is very real, it has also given rise to many myths. If you do not have the right knowledge of SEO, it is very easy to succumb to the most common myths about negative search engine optimization.

The biggest of these myths is that they can easily happen to anyone. But here’s the thing, negative or anti-SEO requires a huge amount of knowledge to effectively implement such a campaign. Also, large corporations or companies are a prime target of spammers who try to destroy search rankings by creating many spam links pointing to competing websites or blogs.

Many people think that negative SEO can damage the rankings of any website, which is not true at all. Most of the time, negative SEO will not do any harm to the websites that have been around for a long time or have been established. The more credible you are as an online resource, the harder it is to break into.

There are a variety of common negative SEO techniques that people can use to ruin your website. These are the most common types to look for:

• Toxic Backlinks:

Low-quality backlinks to a site that have little Domain Authority, little relevance to your industry, or very little site traffic should always be in doubt. If you receive a large influx of these low-quality links, they may be coming from a link farm that has the infrastructure to build a large number of links quickly.

If it’s a new site with a large percentage of toxic links, Google will likely assume that you have engaged in black hat manipulation.

Read How to check whether a link is Do follow or No follow Backlinks

 

• Comment Spam Links:

One of the ways that SEOs used to manipulate their site’s authority was to leave backlinks in the comments section of blogs or forum sites. If you suddenly get backlinks in the comments section of old blogs without any relevance or traffic, they have likely placed them there maliciously. If an SEO agency placed the link and paid for it, fire it up immediately.

Know High Quality Backlinks from Profile Creation Sites List 2020

 

• Exact Match or Unnatural Anchor Text:

Natural anchor text usually includes the name of your brand, services, or products offered by your company, or more general text such as “Click here”. If all of your anchor text contains the specific keyword you’re trying to rank for, it looks like Google’s manipulation.

If the link text is irrelevant, it will confuse the Google bots about the content on your site. It’s important to pay attention to the most common ways other sites link to your site, so if your new links don’t share at least some similarities, you can search for them accordingly.

 

• Fake Negative Reviews:

While negative reviews don’t have as much of an impact on your site’s authority as your backlink profile, Google crawls and processes these sites when considering web page rank.

Local and small businesses with poor reviews will not be ranked, so in addition to checking their back cookie regularly, site owners should also keep an eye on review sites that are important in their industry. Most major review sites allow you to report reviews if you have reason to believe they are false.

 

These techniques can be easily identified using Google Search Console or any kind of backlink analyzer. Recognizing the many ways others may attempt to link to your site in a malicious manner will help you identify those problematic links immediately after they appear in your back cookie.