Nothing can be quite as irritating or as damaging as an unscrupulous competitor or determined unhappy client that is willing to go to any length to harm your business. It doesn’t take much for some people to launch an all out assault on your business, endangering everything you’ve worked for. Maybe they have a valid complaint, maybe not, but engaging in a negative SEO attack is never okay. We have a semi-operational judicial system that will get one better results.
What to look out for.
Did your traffic suddenly drop off the face of the earth? Has Google regulated you to the abyss of forgotten websites (page 2)? If you see a sudden drop off or are experiencing some long term problems it would behove you to investigate the possibility that someone is attacking your SEO. Staying current with your Google analytics will be key to knowing if your dip in traffic is something to be concerned about. Google webmaster tools is the other half of the pie when it comes to resources. It will tell you information about the links to your site and search data. The value here of understanding the backlinks to your site will become apparent momentarily.
How They’re Probably Attacking You.
The most used method for devious negative SEO bullies is the easiest – negative backlinking. Knowing who your backlinks are is important… eh? They’ll link to your site on websites that have bad SEO, are adult oriented, or are otherwise blacklisted by Google. By having a backlink from them, you also get dinged. Get enough of them, and you get smashed.
Redirecting domains is another wrench in the negative SEO toolkit. One that gets thrown into your online growth and potential. By redirecting banned or untrustworthy domains to yours they can forward all of the bad “link juice” associated with that domain to yours. Then Google decides it hates you. Which is not good.
Other methods include attacking your site with viruses or malware, although this is usually reserved for the few negative SEO jerks that actually know what they’re doing; and adding errant social profiles and linking them to your domain. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot you can do to prevent a negative SEO attack, but you can keep an eye out for it by using Google webmaster tools and Google analytics properly (and daily) and you should be able to tell when something screwy is going on.