Negative SEO and Toxic Links- a Menace to your ranks

“Hello, I need help Urgent! At this time, I do optimization for my company's website. And I'm very frustrated because the competition filled this web with toxic links, and it has made many positions fall in Google results. Even though I have eliminated all the negative links, my keywords keep falling.”

Many will not know what Negative SEO refers to and is that even many brands have not dedicated enough time to understand how web positioning works.

Within the world of Black Hat SEO, we could differentiate two aspects: the 'dark' techniques that can be used to increase the web positioning of your page quickly and those that we can use to make it our competitors to lower those positions as quickly. Today we are going to talk about this last (and quite creepy) option.

What is negative SEO?

As we mentioned in the previous paragraph, negative SEO is all that technique or strategy that serves to try to penalize a web page (usually from the competition) through bad arts, getting it to be penalized by Google or at least making it look worse.

There are several things we can do to perform a negative SEO attack, such as sending a lot of low-quality traffic that disproportionately increases the percentage of the web rebound or a D-Two attack with which to block the server by an overwhelming amount of requests that saturate your capacity. But in today's article, we are going to focus on the old trick of toxic bonds.

What is a toxic link, and why does it hurt your website?

A toxic link is a link that links us from a web page of low quality and/or bad reputation for Google. The causes of this can be several: that are farms of links that are infected with viruses that are penalized for multiple reasons. Obviously, a link from this type of pages does not interest us at all.

Well, a negative SEO attack through toxic links is to send hundreds or thousands of links of this type to our website, calling the attention of Google by increasing our link profile in a very unnatural way and with links of a bad reputation.

If we also round up the game with some anchor text full of harmful keywords for our business, chaos is served. If you have a gardening website and suddenly they link you with words like 'the worst gardener', 'gardener of my area' or similar. We’d better try to remedy it before it's too late.

What to do in case of toxic links and negative SEO?

1. Therefore, it is better to prevent than to regret, and the first thing that should be done in these cases is always to monitor our website and have the new backlinks on our radar. In order to avoid affecting our positions. Although in your case it's already too late for that.
2. Eliminate all toxic links is the second step, although that you already did. It can be done from the search console. At this point, we advise you to verify that in reality all these toxic links have been eliminated. You can use the Google Disavow Tool to disavow all negative links using a .txt file.
3. Eliminate space generating negative links: There are spaces on websites that are usually susceptible to toxic links, such as forums. So at this point, we suggest, that, if the attack reaches just one of those spaces and this does not have much use-you eliminate it. It is preferable to do it to save work, as long as that space does not have great utility, of course.
4.  The truth is there is no way to get immunized against these attacks, but if you have a good amount of positive backlinks, Google will not give much importance. Therefore at this time, you have to start working on it again.
5. If your content has fallen below the first page of results, you can modify the titles and Meta descriptions of the content - posts, where the toxic links point. I do not say to change them, but to modify the words to try to rank with new ones.
6. Make sure that the falls in the positioning do not come only by toxic links. Check in the Search Console that there are also no other penalties for the other Google animals. This is a good time for you to do a full SEO Analysis and know what else is missing from this website in terms of SEO.

Quality content, medicine for toxic bonds

Once all the debugging of the SEO of your website is done, it is time to give Google reasons to return to classify you in the first results.

And in this context, what your website needs the most is quality content to give Google more reasons to rank in the top positions. So you have a great job in this area.

Probability of being a victim of negative SEO

Negative SEO affects all brands that compete in search engines and on the Internet. That is, to anyone. It is therefore important that both content creators and large companies devote time and effort to combat some of these bad practices. SEO negative attacks multiply when the website in question competes in very competitive niches or specific themes. In addition, the more useful the website, the less likely there is that Google penalizes it, despite suffering from negative SEO attacks.

The objective of the content creators is to generate useful and relevant information that the users themselves consider valuable. This will return to the web and generate organic backlinks. If as a brand, you want to create authentic content and avoid negative SEO, do not hesitate to contact us.

Our recommendation is to contact professionals so as not to make the situation worse. If in spite of not having technical knowledge you do it, it is necessary to say that you are working under your own responsibility. The decision remains in you! But that yes, put the solution as soon as possible.

 

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