Making sure that your website is SEO-friendly is every website owner's mission, or at least should be. Mostly because it aims to deliver better results for your business, keeps you in the competition, and helps improve your search rankings. But, on your mission to make your website more SEO-friendly, you also want to make sure that there isn't any negative SEO present.
As competition in every industry rises, owners sometimes feel the need to attack other businesses in the sleaziest ways. Negative SEO attacks are rare, but they can cause a huge mess for your business if they do occur. So, make sure that you're not a victim of negative SEO by implementing the following methods.
Keep A Check On Your Backlinks
Get used to monitoring your backlinks when it comes to keeping a check on negative SEO. Many times, spammers and other competitors may create low-quality backlinks or 301 redirects to your website. It will harm the overall presence of your website, and you surely don't want that. To avoid this, you must keep a check on your backlinks. While manual checking is impossible, you can easily use tools available online to monitor your backlinks.
You can find an excellent backlink monitoring tool here.
Use Google Webmaster Tools
Make sure that you have your alerts on if you're using Google webmaster. It helps you in many ways as you get regular alerts regarding your website. With this, you will know whether your website is under threat from malware, has server connectivity problems, unindexed pages, and more. Constant optimizing is essential if you wish to make sure that you avoid negative SEO for your website.
Keep Your Website Secure From Any Malware And Hackers
When it comes to your website security, you need to ensure that you're taking the right steps. You don't want to deal with unwanted surprises in the form of spams. If your website security is not up to date, then you are susceptible to negative SEO.
Get the right plugins and tools to keep your website safe from any hacking activity or malware. Adding a security check can help make sure that spammers can easily log in to your site. Authentication codes can amp up your security levels and keep hackers away from your website.
Lookout For Copied Content
Content copying is an issue that makes way for negative SEO and can lower your rankings on Google. Your competitors may use your content and put it out across on several different platforms. With duplicated content, your rank on Google will surely go down as your website will become unauthentic and unoriginal, at least in Google's eyes.
There's a possibility of penalization as well. To steer clear of this issue, you need to make sure that you're taking the right steps to verify whether your content is copied. Use Copyscape to check if any other platforms are using your content to be safe.
Each of these methods will help ensure that you don't generate negative SEO. While there are other options out there as well for you to go about, but focusing on these few important ones will keep you from falling prey to negative SEO.