Carlina Yepinski is the primary researcher and writer for networkmonitoring.org. Her most recent accomplishments includes graduating from Kentucky State with a degree in communications and computer science. Her current focus for the site involves network monitor tools and ms network monitor. 

If you are able to manipulate your search-engine ranking for the better, then that means there is room to manipulate it for the worse also. The same strategies you use to help your SEO can be used against you to bring it down.

So-called “negative SEO” typically involves creating a poor linking profile for your site. Competitors can purchase a large amount of spammy links pointing back at your site, fooling Google into thinking that you have a low-quality site and causing it to demote you in search results.

While you can’t do anything to prevent these attacks, there are several things you can do to protect yourself from them:

Get More Natural Links

The best way to defend against negative SEO attacks is to build a high-quality link profile. You can do this by building natural links by writing great content that motivates others to link to it. You can also do this by contacting top-quality sites within your niche and asking for links, offering to guest post, or contributing to the comments.

The more quality links you have, the less likely that low-quality links will impact your search rank. Also be sure to vary your anchor text for your links, using a combination of exact match keywords, your brand name or URL, and generic terms such as “click here.”

Monitor Your Referral Traffic

You can’t defend against a negative SEO attack if you don’t know that it is happening. Be sure to closely monitor all your referral traffic and incoming links so that you know the source of all your back links. Note which links you were responsible for generating, and investigate any links that appear to be organic. You may find that new links were not provided by admiring blog owners who enjoyed your content, but rather came from spammy sites and were purchased or submitted by competitors.

Remove Low-Quality Links

You are not helpless to accept the low-quality links that are pointing to your site. When you find links that you do not want, simply contact the site owner and ask to have them removed. If the site owner refuses, submit your e-mails and any other supporting documentation to Google. It is possible that the links can be removed from search calculations so that they do not count against your ranking.

Own All Brand Properties

Your blog or website are not the only places that your brand can exist on the Internet. Make sure that you have registered and are actively managing profiles for your brand on all the major social-networking sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Stumble Upon and others. You do not have to be actively using any of these sites, but you should establish a reputable presence on these sites so that a competitor can’t set up a dummy profile and use it to hurt your brand.

Negative SEO has become a concern since the new Google Penguin update, which puts special focus on the link profile of a site when determining search ranking. Making sure that you are aware of the source of all your back links, and working to actively build a healthy link profile by building high-quality links and remove low-quality links will help protect you from any attempted negative SEO attacks.

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