Competitors are always a major part of any business whether is it is physical or online. SEO business also has competition of ranking and to surpass in earning by a quality site. Ranking is the backbone of SEO and our competitor can hurt our ranking in search engine. Competitors can use malevolent activities to hurt the ranking of our site and to bring their own site in search engine ranking. Many people use white hat SEO to get this ranking but some use the opposite way. They don’t improve their site ranking and quality instead they start to attack on the other’s site to bring it down in ranking. This technique is called Negative SEO. Every webmaster wants to deal with negative SEO as soon as possible so I would like to share some points related to Negative SEO on our site for my all new learners of SEO ( me too ). Malicious Attack: Most common used practice is to have malicious attack on other’s site in which competitors hacks the detail of our site, get in to detail, make changes in robots.txt files and put Spammy content on our site. Spammy content is against the rules of Google so they use it to hurt the ranking of site in the eye of Google. Bad/Un-natural backlinks: In this method competitors created un-natural or bad links for the site which they want to hurt. For this bad links they use Adults, gambling and casino related sites to create backlinks for your sites and pay to those sites webmasters. When Google check the bad links than ranking start to drop down and site get hurt badly. Reports to Google: In this practice reports are send to Google that site is working against the rules and guidelines of Google. Google consider it abusing and check the whole site and working to see if you are doing anything which Google doesn’t allow. If Google find this our site can be penalized and competitors can bring their site in ranking. Ways to check if negative SEO has been done to our site: If we want to check that if there any negative SEO has been done to our site or not we should follow these ways. 1: use Google Webmaster Tool to check the stats of our sites and have check and balance on back links. Google Webmaster Tool notifies us if there is any malware or bad link found. So if we find anything unusual it’s time to take action to correct it. 2: if any sudden drop down in traffic has been found than there is a lot of chance that negative SEO has been done to our site. Analytics data will report all the change in traffic. We should also check all stats to make it sure we are doing nothing against Google Webmaster guidelines. So these were the things which will let us know about when our competitors try to hurt the ranking or traffic of our site. Next I will publish how to recover from negative SEO. I just shared my point of view and knowledge about these concepts. I would like to have suggestion of my seniors so I can improve my knowledge and learn new things. Any criticism is also welcome. Note: (I apologize for my bad English as English is not my first language so for the mistakes I am sorry)
Good also for immediate response go to Webmaster tools settings > Webmaster Tools Preferences > Enable email notifications > Choose > Top Site Issue (Critical issue like Malware attacks that need attention now). Now finally hit the blue Save button. You are done
Some good steps to follow An easy way to tell if you've been smacked is to do an index test in Google for your domain. Or, if you go from page 1 to page 50 overnight, likely something's gone on. Rankings usually trend downward, and require constant upkeep in most cases. If there's a sharp decline there's a reason why.