A lot of discussion lately has been going around if negative SEO exists. You may be thinking, what is negative SEO? Negative SEO is when a competitor that is trying to rank for the same keyword as you would point thousands and thousands of spammy backlinks to your website.
The biggest ongoing discussion has been the forum thread on Traffic Planet where some people are claiming to have affected the rankings of a website owned by a very white hat SEO expert.
The people who are claiming to do this are convinced their negative SEO was successful while Dan Thies who owns the site claims that the site's rankings fell due to him changing the structure and theme of the website. Dan Thies states that when he switched to a new theme that affected the overall structure of the website which caused the rankings to fall like they did.
Rand Fishkin is the owner of a very recognized SEO website called SEOmoz. In the forum thread on Traffic Planet he gave anyone the challenge to try negative SEO on SEOmoz or his own personal website randfishkin.com. Most people agreed in the forum thread that both of those websites were two authority websites that would take a very long time to have an effect on the rankings, if at all. Most people stated it would be more worthwhile to do a smaller site that is not as a big authority in the niche that the particular website is in.
Now that you have the general overview of the forum thread on Traffic Planet, we are now going to discuss our opinion of negative SEO on an established website, and what our strategy would be for negative SEO. In my opinion negative SEO on a reputable website is possible if you give it enough time and invest the necessary amount of money into it. Before we go into any more detail there is a difference between a website like SEOmoz and the New York Times. Obviously a website the size of the New York Times is not going to be affected by negative SEO.
A strategy to affect SEOmoz with negative SEO would have to be put in place before you started. These are the three main steps I would take on a massive scale to try to have SEOmoz affected by negative SEO:
- 301 re-direct sites hosting the malware to SEOmoz.
- Scrape the content on SEOmoz's blog and get it indexed before SEOmoz does. This would cause a problem with duplicate content, and they wouldn't get any credit for fresh content.
- Point spammy backlinks to SEOmoz with the same anchor text and do tens of thousands per day.
Now a lot of people are probably concerned about what they can do to prevent negative SEO with their sites. The first thing you can do is build a very natural link profile with high quality links coming from a variety of sources and with diverse anchor texts. Some types of natural links we recommend building are social media links, guest posting, link outreach, social bookmarking, blog comments, press releases, and natural links from the press as well as other websites.
Make sure you have 100% unique content on your website, and if you have a blog on your website update it consistently, so the search engines know when it is time to check your site again. A site map that updates automatically and a correctly formatted robots.txt will help your content get indexed quicker as well. The more reputable your website is to the search engines which is shown in a large part by quality backlinks will help your content get indexed quicker as well.
If you focus on creating awesome content and quality links to your website this will naturally establish you as an authority in your niche, which will help your website not to be affected by negative SEO.
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