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What Is Negative SEO and How Can You Avoid It?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of practices that improve your website’s ranking in search results. A high search rank is crucial for optimum interaction with your target audience, meaning those people most likely to use your goods and services. In addition to building recognition of your business online, an improved search rank can also result in more sales conversions and a bigger bottom line.
While SEO is positive in the majority of cases, there’s also negative SEO. The same principles that enhance your website’s rank can also diminish it when used nefariously. While damaging, knowing how negative SEO works can help you defend against it.
Types of Negative SEO
Competitors can use a range of negative SEO tactics to damage search rank, including:
- Forcefully Crawling – Proper indexing of a website ensures it can be effectively searched. Web crawling is integral in creating indexes, but it can slow down a website. Forcefully crawling a site negatively affects performance and can even cause the site to crash.
- Content Duplication – Search engines penalize duplicate content by decreasing the rank of the site. By taking content from your website and duplicating it on others, your search rank can potentially decrease.
- Link Farming – High quality links pointing to your site boost its rank, while low-quality links decrease it. Accordingly, a competitor can create a site solely for the purpose of sending low-quality links your way.
What You Can Do to Protect Your Site
The good news is that negative SEO tactics usually only become an issue when competition is high between businesses in certain industries. However, making sure your site is fully secured and protected will prevent hackers from infiltrating it and changing important settings. Building up a positive backlink profile is also beneficial, as it can offset any negative links pointing towards your site. In this case, make your website an authority in your industry and frequently update with quality content to attract positive backlinks.
SEO is a major component of online marketing success, and SonicSEO.com has what it takes to get you to the top of the results page. We provide SEO solutions to clients to boost visibility and increase potential sales conversions. We also monitor your website on a regular basis to ensure it’s performing as well as we expect. Reach out to our team today to discuss your current SEO strategy.