A negative SEO attack can be a nightmare for businesses. It can undo all the hard work on link-building that they have carried out. They have to sit back and watch their entry fall down the search rankings.
Sales can be lost and it can take a lot of work to get things back on track. This time and effort could be spent on other aspects of your business.
According to the experts at the Search Engine Journal, businesses often notice that something is going wrong when they see a huge drop in organic search traffic to their site.
Crawl budget optimization can help you out if Google doesn’t crawl enough pages on your site.
At this stage, you may need to call in a London SEO agency such as www.elevateuk.com/ to help investigate the issue and get your SEO strategy back on track. The best way to prepare for these attacks is to be fully aware of when and how they can occur. Here’s what you need to know.
Attacks using links
Having links to your site shared is a good thing! However, it is likely that if those links are merely shared by bot networks it will adversely affect your rankings in the future.
Anonymous and fake press releases can be used to place links with a damaging news story using a rich anchor text. This could result in algorithms judging that link harshly.
Attacks using content
Duplicate content is always bad news for rankings. A proxy gateway site can crawl any website and effectively make a copy of it. Google is not focussing so much now on URLs so this practice may be set to increase. The effect is that a site is robbed of the traffic that it should receive because it is directed to the duplicate site.
Bulk GDPR compliance complaints are likely to be part of negative SEO attacks in Europe now that the new regulations are in force. The ranking pages would be targeted with the aim being to get those pages removed.
Attacks using user signals
It is surprisingly easy to swamp Google hosted features with bad reviews and false information that take a long time to rectify. Soon, it is likely to become more widespread using senior Google reviewer accounts which can mark business listings as closed when they are actually still open and alter business addresses to false addresses.
