Negative SEO is real! In as much as many brands struggle to have good SEO, it is possible that you could be doing certain things that could result in a bad SEO which automatically affects the indexing and ranking of the website. It could also cause your website to completely vanish from search engines.

In other cases, there might be other external factors outside the control of the brand that can cause bad SEO. This includes hackers or people duplicating their content by copying it. Either way, brands need to be very cautious and aware of these external and internal factors that could negatively impact their SEO. For brands in a very niche and highly competitive market, it is very common for them to experience such negative SEO usually caused by “corporate attacks” on the website.

If you would like to protect your website from the effects of negative SEO it would be wise to get in touch with an SEO agency to assist you. For now, let’s take a look at 6 tips to protect your own website from negative SEO.

1. Track and monitor all websites linking to yours

It is very important to track and monitor all backlinks or external links driving some sort of traffic to your website. And there are various free to paid tools that can be used to make it way easier for you. Backlinks can be likened to a brand representative online. These links are point search engines to the website – telling them that there’s something worth checking and indexing on that website. But the tricky part is that these search engines first check out the quality of the website referring first, before going ahead to check that linked website.

It somehow believes that the quality of the website referring would determine the quality of the website it is referring the search engine to. So, this is why website owners need to be vigilant about their backlinks. Next, ensure any identified bad backlinks are submitted to Google in time. This will help search engines to ignore such links to keep your website SEO clean and healthy.

2. Protect your content

Whether we like it or not, some people are out there hunting for good content that they can steal and publish on their own website. Some of these sites might also have bots that can automatically do this for them. And the saddening part here is that some of these websites might end up ranking better on search engines that you, the original owner of the content.

3. Ensure that the website is secure

The security of the brand’s website should be a priority. Most successful websites are often victims of various hacks and attacks. Website visitors will also be negatively affected with any such attacks and this will discourage them from visiting the website frequently. This ultimately affects the experience of the user. Brands should ensure that everything necessary to protect their website is put in place.

Most hackers aim at taking control of the website, so they often attack the administrative page of the website to take over the website from the owner. Keeping a very strong password can help as well as changing the password as often as possible. In addition, you can also use a two-way authentication plugin (like Google authentication plugin) to make the website login process very complex for hackers.

4. Poor website speed

Website speed is a major criterion for having good SEO, this implies that if the speed of the website is poor, it could negatively impact SEO. Brands need to invest in software that can help improve the speed of the website. In addition, remove any databases or plugin that might be affecting the opening speed of the website. You should also consider looking into the memory space for the website, to ensure that the website has more than enough space to hold all the different files. Find other free to paid tools for optimizing the speed of the website.

Faster website opening speed encourages more visitors to come to the website which automatically increases the organic traffic of the website. Another factor that can affect the website speed is the website hosting platform. If you have tried all you can to improve site speed, check with the hosting company to be sure that it’s not a fault from their end.

5. Look out for reviews about the brand on other websites

Reputation is vital to the success of any brand. It is all about ensuring that people, especially the target audience have a good perception of the brand. If you have registered for Google my business or have a Facebook business page, always be on the lookout out for getting good reviews about the brand on those platforms.

While it is impossible to control what reviews get published on these platforms, it is possible to try your best to provide excellent customer service and encourage the customers to put up a review about the brand on such platforms. So that it can drown other negative reviews. Also try to reach out to people with negative reviews, to see how you can improve on their unpleasant experience. However, you should also note that there are some people who are just out to ruin the reputation of a brand irrespective of whether they have used the service or product or not. In this instance, you can with reach out to such websites and come to a mutual agreement or get more authority websites to do a review so it can drown the noise of such hateful websites.

6. Completely avoid keyword stuffing

We all know that keywords are very essential in SEO especially for websites that were to rank higher for certain competitive niche. However, search engines frown heavily on loading a website page with various keywords in an attempt to spike up the ranking of the website on the search engine.

Sometimes, content on the website can appear to be stuffed with keywords unknowingly. Take a closer look at all content pushed out on the website, remove redundant keywords and avoid using keywords more than five times in a single content (including in the title, supporting images as well as meta tags).