There are many different tactics that an online business owner will use when trying to attract sales. One of the most interesting is called “negative SEO” and it has been in use for quite some time.
What is Negative SEO?
Basically, instead of trying to build up your own business recognition through standard SEO or search engine optimization tactics you instead focus your efforts on bringing down your competition by using keywords or key phrases and applying a link attack against that business.
Does Negative SEO Really Work?
The answer is a definite “yes”. Essentially, the tactics used by business owners to ruin their competition does still work in today’s era of website protection companies that try to blunt such tactics. However, there are some proven techniques that do blunt the efforts of negative SEO from working against your website. You will have to be vigilant and check your rankings regularly to spot what the competition is doing so you can catch them before Google catches you.
- Apply Rewrite Rules in Your .htaccess file
- Monitor the Traffic via Cpanle stats
- Block those IP addresses in your .htaccess file
- Use the Google “Disavow link tool ” and upload all irrelevant links to it. Be careful if they are Spammy links or black hat seo tactics
By continually using these tactics, you can head off a great deal of the effects of negative SEO before they can seriously harm your online business. If you make it a habit to monitor such attacks at regular times during the day, you can prevent them and your website will be safe from harm. The last thing you want is to wake up and see your website banned because of negative SEO.
There will be times when your competition might be angry at you, perhaps they are having a bad hair day or are just simply a moron and they attack you on Google Plus or other social media sites for no good reason. This type of defamation can be difficult at first to deal with effectively if you are not sure what to do.
Unfortunately if a competitor decides on hurting your brand reputation on social media, authorities will not do anything about it nor do search engines such as Google. They will not remove those type of content from their search results. Ironically Google does not act upon their own TOS policy. So you are on your own to act upon the malicious defamation on social media such as Google plus, Twitter, Facebook. As you see this is where evil wins over good..
One thing you should not do is respond directly to the attack since it will only make the problem worse. Taking it to the “authorities” will not do you any good as well. Instead, you will need to employ efforts that run the balance between addressing the charges your competition has made with promoting your own business so that potential customers who see both will wind up choosing you. After all, many singular negative attacks, especially from only one source can be dealt with, but a concerted attack from multiple sources may be impossible to overcome.
If anything, the key lies in not relying on an online search engine to promote your reputation as well as your ranking. Once you focus your sales efforts away from that, then you can become immune to such defamation attacks on your business.
Golden Way Media Offers Brand Recognition and Brand Reputation Service