SEO professionals and website owners are always on the move to rank their websites on search engines. Every website owner dreams of his site being the first page upon a Google search by a customer. Unfortunately, some unscrupulous competitors are always finding ways to bring down the top competitor sites so that their websites will rank instead.
They launch negative SEO attacks that will de-rank your website. Even though these techniques maybe not be that dangerous, they may have lasting consequences on your site’s rank ability on search engines. Negative SEO can be performed after a combination of several conventional techniques which include:
•Creating spammy backlinks
•Removing some of your useful links
•Website hacking
However, most competitors will go for the spammy backlinks to your website. It is the most common tactic to bring down top-performing websites. Google is growing smarter daily nowadays as it is ignoring most of the spammy links.
What are bad links?
Most people are aware of what a Spam is, but to the few novices in the tech world, here is what a spam is. In a layman’s language, it is like a flea that infects your digital pet. Basically, digital pet is your website. It takes most of your resources but never giving anything in return. A spam backlink can be very problematic to your site if not dealt with at the right time.
The backlinks may show up in comments to your posts, replies to threads on site, and so on. The spam will often have a backlink that directs traffic to the spammer’s website. Most of these spam backlinks will be developed for monetary purposes. However, not all will be for money; some of them may be created to the benefit of the website without the consent of the administrators.
Ultimately these links will damage the credibility of the website, and they will also hog resources from the site. They welcome lots of unwanted maintenance and expenses. The worst, however, that can happen is Google de-indexing your website after the website gets a reputation for generating, promoting and engaging in spammy activities.
Diversion between Low Quality and High-Quality Backlinks
Not all backlinks are equal. The high-quality backlinks are very vital and valuable to your website. These will enhance your domain authority, increase your reputation and ultimately assist your site rank high in search engines. The low-quality backlinks have detrimental effects on your website. They will lower the authority of your site in search engines, affect your SEO strategy and compromise the incoming traffic to your website. If your website is to make it in this competitive world of online businesses, you should be aware of the difference between the two.
Low-Quality Backlinks
•Typical source. If the link is built from a low-quality website, then the link will also be inferior quality. Also, check the relevance of the link. Any link to an unrelated site will be low quality since it does not relate to the website.
•Intention. The reason for creating a link is also another determining factor to the quality. Google penguin will always know why you decided to create a particular link. In any case, Google assesses that the link is not useful in any way and only creates traffic, then it will be a low-quality link hence raising the spam score.
High-Quality Backlinks
•Typical source. With these backlinks, the high-quality source will mean that the backlink will also be of high quality. High-quality backlinks can be created by linking the site to highly relevant sources in your line of business.
•Intention. Well, to anyone, a high-quality link will be purposely for citing a fact, connecting a crucial site to another and categorically improve ranking in Google search engines.
How to Stop the Spammy Links from Affecting your Website
1.Spam links you should avoid
Every link that is not relevant to your website is considered a toxic backlink. You do not want them to find their way to your site. Here are some backlinks that you should avoid:
•Foreign language site links
•Several links coming from unrelated websites
•Penalized domains links
•Link directories links
•Bad neighbourhoods links such as online gambling and porn links
Some of these links could bring about an arithmetic penalty from Google, while some may make Google think you want to manipulate rankings hence a considerable penalty.
2.Get to the source of these links
Use tools such as SEMRush, Moz and Ahrefs to detect spam backlinks and where they could be coming from. These apps use distinct metrics to determine the spammy links. Try to get an exported report from any app you will use to find these links. From there, you can evaluate the links bringing down your website and contact them to remove such links directing to your site.
3.Request Removal
Chances of the offending webmaster in removing the link from your site are very minimal. However, Google requires you to request the webmaster to remove it before you tell them to assume that link. In most cases, you will not be able to contact the person who has set up the link. If you do not hear from the webmaster after contacting them, you can talk to the hosting company so that they can bring down the toxic backlink.
4.Come up with a Disavow file and send it to Google
Ultimately, all the website owners will consider Google’s Disavow bad link to help them out. It is a simple tool that allows users to import a file that has all the links Google should ignore on your website. With this, you can specify the URLs or probably ask Google to disregards specific domain links.
You should, however, be careful with these Disavow links feature by doing a thorough assessment of the backlinks on your website. You do not want to disregard high-quality backlinks that will negatively affect organic rankings on your website.
The entire process takes time, so after you submit the request, you should wait as the rankings will slowly start recovering. In as much as Google tries to look at the low-quality backlinks and ignore them, you should make sure that you conduct backlink audits on your website to do away with spammy links.
See Also : Link Building Services
