Negative SEO is not a myth, and it can potentially destroy a website via backlink spamming or malicious backlinks while degrading organic search visibility. Though negative SEO isn't of big concern in the search engine optimization Dubai sector, it's still a threat that should be avoided. 

Negative SEO

It could be the result of an attack from a disgruntled competitor or from their SEO team to take out the competition the easy way. Not everyone play by the rules when it comes to SEO. They can ruin rival websites with spammy links, fake reviews, or just hack them. This black hat SEO technique is referred to as negative SEO, among a few other things. Negative SEO can potentially nullify all your carefully planned search engine marketing efforts. 

However, there are ways to avoid negative SEO if you are diligent enough. Here are 4 effective ways to protect your website from a negative SEO assault. 

Link Audits

Regular link audits are often recommended as a good practice by any good SEO company. Link audits also serve the purpose of helping you spot suspicious activities like a huge number of backlinks that you didn't build. Monitoring the growth of your links is an effective way to identify a negative SEO attack before things go south. If you detect link farm spamming, you should inform Google immediately and disavow the links. 

Site Speed

Your website’s speed influence your search engine ranking too. If you notice that your site speed is dropping, you should use a crawling software and look for suspicious activity just in case. 

If you still don’t see a problem, it could be forceful crawling – something which causes a heavy server load consequently slowing down the website or even crash it. If you are tech savvy, you can try finding the perpetrators yourself manually. If you have no idea what to do, contact your web host to figure out where the load is coming from. 

Look for Scraped Content

Everyone’s started to see what content marketing can do for their business online. But not all of them are creative enough to create content. This means there’s a chance for good content to get scraped. 

Scraping is when someone takes content from your website and copies it entirely to other websites claiming ownership of that content. They can combine it with link farming to spam your website in the process. But the real problems start when Google indexes the copied content before the original content that you own. This could end up with your webpage getting devalued subsequently losing its rank in search engine result pages.

You can use tools like Copyscape to check if someone scraped your content. If someone did, you can contact the webmaster to have them remove your content. If they are unwilling, report them to Google.

Google My Business

Google My Business presents yet another way to avoid negative SEO in the form of negative reviews. Negative criticism is acceptable. You can learn a lot of things from negative reviews and improve your business. But when negative reviews start flooding your website without justifiable cause, it can seriously damage your business’ reputation. It might be indicating that someone out there is gunning for your website.

As a countermeasure, use social media listening software to monitor your online reputation, and keep an eye on your Google My Business listing. If you think some of those reviews are fake, flag them and fill out the report form. 

Conclusion

Though it’s rare, and Google already has some good measures to catch suspicious linking behavior before it impacts SERPs, it’s still a wise idea to be careful just in case, considering the fact that there are clever people out there trying to find ways to beat the system.