- What's up guys. So in this video,
I'm going to teach you all about negative SEO,
pretty much everything you need to know about it, right?
So how to protect your website?
What is negative SEO?
How can it affect your site?
And what are some of the risks involved
that you need to know to make sure
that you can avoid being attacked
by negative SEO in the future.
Now, when it comes to negative SEO,
basically this is a form of attacking your site
so that your rankings drop on Google, right?
So there are certain ways
that people can manipulate your site,
even if they don't own it,
even if they don't have access to it,
that can hurt your rankings
and destroy your rankings on Google
so that you lose all the traffic,
all the hard work, all the energy and time
that you've spent on your website.
So this is a really serious issue
and one that you need to be aware about.
So when it comes to negative SEO,
this can involve hacking.
It could involve spamming your site with dodgy backlinks.
It could involve DDoSing your site
so that you get overloaded.
There are all these ways to attack your site.
Now, what do I mean by this?
Well, for example,
when it comes to spamming your site with dodgy backlinks,
there's certain services out there
that you can pay for
to attack your competitors.
And it's something that I absolutely don't recommend.
I really don't like this tactic.
And it's something that can be very, very harmful.
And it's not good for your brand, your reputation,
if you do this sort of stuff to other people.
Unfortunately, there's a very slim chance
that you may be targeted by negative SEO in the future too.
For example, right, let's look at negative SEO
when it comes to off-page, link building,
and spamming your site.
Well, basically what people could do is
they can go onto a website, @fiverr.com,
they can buy like 50,000 backlinks,
and get them built instantly to your site.
They don't have access to your site.
They don't have any control of your site,
but it's easy for anyone
to send dodgy backlinks to your site.
And this is a problem because what they could do
is build all these spammy backlinks,
point into your URL
and all of a sudden
Google is gonna pick this up in its algorithm.
It's going to think potentially
that your trying to manipulate your rankings
with excessive link building.
And this goes against Google's link schemes.
So there are guidelines on basically
how to ethically do SEO,
and how to optimize your site.
So basically if you're building
spammy links to your site in excess,
then Google hits you with a hour of penalty.
Now, the problem is sometimes Google doesn't know
was that you that was built in the backlinks
or was it someone trying to spam your site
with negative SEO?
So what can happen sometimes
is someone buys this service in Fiverr,
they send thousands of backlinks to your website,
and you receive a manual action penalty
in Google webmaster tools that says
you violated the Google's link schemes,
and therefore you're receiving a penalty.
And this is so harsh because it can wipe out
95% of your traffic overnight.
I've seen it happen.
It's savage.
It's not something I would wish on my worst enemy.
And really this is a very unethical practice.
So what can you do about it?
Well, if your site gets spammed with off-page links
that are very low quality, low grade,
and potentially have a risk of a manual action penalty,
then make sure you are checking
your backlink profile regularly, okay?
Keep an eye out for bad quality links.
Use a tool like Ahrefs to monitor your backlink profile.
And basically, make sure that if you see the signs
of excessive numbers of toxic links,
go in to your site and make sure you get them disavowed.
I've actually created a tutorial previously
on disavowing backlinks to your website.
I think you'll find it very useful.
It doesn't take too long to do, but it's incredibly useful
if you're getting spammed with low quality sites.
So that's something to be aware of.
Also, there are other forms
of doing negative SEO to your site.
For example, DDoSing, right?
DDoSing basically means
that someone gets a ton of traffic
firing straight at your site
and overloads your site,
overloads your service
so that your website crashes.
There's too much traffic on the site,
and therefore your pages go down
because servers are not built to handle
extreme amounts of traffic
especially if you don't get it regularly.
So this is another form of negative SEO.
Because if your site goes down from a DDoS attack,
then websites aren't working anymore,
your pages are down,
no one can see the content on your site.
And that impacts your SEO
because all of a sudden Google's algorithm sees
that when it crawls your site,
your site's not working,
and therefore all your rankings drop
and the traffic drops as well.
There's another form as well
where people can hack your site.
And unfortunately, this does happen.
The chances are very slim, but it can happen.
If someone hacks your site
and they managed to log into your backend,
into your control panel,
or into your content management system,
then they could pretty much do anything to your site.
They could take down all your pages.
They could make certain edits on your site.
They could insert backlinks
that you don't want and don't even know about.
So you have to be very careful
with DDoSing and hacking too.
Now, how can you prevent these?
Well, first of all, what you can do
is install a WordPress plugin called Wordfence.
And Wordfence is a very powerful security plugin
that is designed to protect your site from hacks
and from any suspicious activity.
And actually what it does is it sends you alerts
when it sees any sort of suspicious activity
that could harm your site.
So this is quite a useful tool for monitoring
and tracking this.
And a lot of website owners out there
are using Wordfence right now.
I highly recommend it.
It's free to use.
And it's only going to protect your site in the long run.
Also what I would recommend doing
and most people just don't do this,
or they procrastinate on it,
but you should change the login page to your website, right?
So for example, on WordPress the default login page is
yourURL/wp-admin,
and that's where most people log in.
And usually people don't change that page
which means that if someone's trying to hack your site,
they can send attacks to this default page,
and 9% of the time,
that's a default page everyone's still using.
You haven't had a chance to change in a year,
or you just haven't got around to it,
or you don't even know that you can change your admin page.
So I would highly recommend changing the admin login page
if you're using WordPress because it's an easy target.
And it's the default page that hackers will go to
if they're trying to get into your site
and send a negative SEO attack to your site.
So yeah, change the page.
You can do that in your control panel.
It's a 100% worth.
It only takes about two minutes to do
once you figure out how to do this,
but it's another way to protect your site.
And in the past, for example,
I've received crazy amounts of alerts by Wordfence
for people trying to basically log into my page
from suspicious locations.
As soon as I changed the admin login page, the default URL,
made a big difference,
and I don't receive anywhere near
as many security alerts anymore.
So it's an easy one to do.
It will save you two minutes,
and it will save you potentially
a lot of frustration in the future.
Now, the thing is with negative SEO,
there's a lot of problems outside of your control, okay.
So you can do your best to protect your site.
You can disavow toxic backlink.
You can keep an eye on your backlink profile.
You can monitor Ahrefs
to see what sort of links are coming in.
And then you can also install WordPress,
and you can change the login page for your WordPress,
or CMS or whatever content management system you're using.
At the same time,
there's certain elements out of your control.
You can't stop your competitors
from trying to attack your site,
or you can't stop hackers from trying to hack your site.
Sometimes even though the chances are very slim,
you will get targeted,
especially if you're in a notoriously
sort of black hat industry
where all sorts of unethical practices happen.
So you have to accept with any sort of business,
not just your website, not just SEO,
but in any type of business,
there's always a risk, okay?
And the risk is negative SEO
that could take away all the time
and hard work you've put into a website,
and hurt your rankings overnight.
So you have to be a little bit stoic about this
and accept that, okay, there may be people in the future
that will try to attack my site,
or there may be a chance of a negative SEO attack.
But you can't be too paranoid about it, okay?
It's not a major risk.
It happens sometimes.
It still happens in 2021.
But the chances are very slim.
Unless you've made a few enemies, (chuckles)
or you're an easy target,
then you shouldn't worry about it too much.
I'm really, with any type of risk,
you can't let these things stop.
You know, you have to see it as a calculated risk.
It's out there.
It's an issue.
It does happen to some sites, unfortunately.
But at the same time, don't let it stop you from doing SEO
because the rewards are so high.
Now, the other thing to remember as well is that these days,
Google's algorithm is fairly sophisticated.
So it's not like a few years ago
where you could send any sort of spammy links to a website
and hurt their rankings
and potentially get them a penalty
or even guarantee that you can get them a penalty.
These days, Google's algorithm
is designed to spot low quality links
and to just ignore them,
not to penalize every single website that does this.
Even though there's a risk of negative SEO,
even though sometimes it can work,
and you can get a manual action penalty,
Google's algorithm is upgrading every year.
It's improving every year,
and it's designed to ignore low quality links as well.
So you can't worry about it too much.
However, if this has happened to you,
what you need to do is use Google's webmaster tools
and disavow the low quality toxic links
that are hurting your site.
So thanks for watching guys.
I hope this video helped you.
If it did,
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And if you want more videos about SEO and link building,
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because we post regularly. (bell dings)
And also I do run a link building agency.
That's @juliangoldie.com.
I'll leave the link in description.
If you want more backlinks,
if you want to increase your rankings of SEO,
if you want to get more search traffic to your website,
then definitely book in a consultation via our website.
And we'll be happy to help you. Thanks.