If your website gets hacked, attackers can perform a negative on-page SEO and rewrite your content with toxic and negative terms, which can trigger a warning from Google or even shut down your site for a while.
Negative SEO And DDoS Attack
If your website gets hacked, attackers can perform a negative on-page SEO and rewrite your content with toxic and negative terms, which can trigger a warning from Google or even shut down your site for a while.
Negative SEO And DDoS Attack
The impact of a DDoS attack may be significantly harmful to a website and cause losses in ad revenue. The recovery may last for days, weeks or even months, regardless of whether these attacks occur as short bursts or frequent strikes.
Unsurprisingly, in November 2021, Microsoft announced that they had experienced the largest DDoS attack in history. It came from around 10 000 sources from multiple countries worldwide, targeting Azure in Asia.
There are many ways an external body can harm your organic performance; take every negative from the Google Webmaster Guidelines and someone can do this to your site to cause a penalty and attack your organic performance.
This may also count as hacking, but instead of messing up your website, DDoS attacks aim to shut it down completely. DDoS stands for distributed denial-of-service, a malicious attempt to prevent legitimate requests and traffic from reaching your website by flooding your server or its surrounding infrastructure until its resources are exhausted.
Using your favorite link analysis tool, you will need to segment the links you expect to have (your old links) to the new ones you believe are coming from an attack. This step is very easy to oversimplify because link scoring varies significantly, depending on your philosophy of links, risk tolerance and which tool you use to score links. The end result of this step is a list of links you think are part of an attack.
If you were to look at your backlinks in your favorite link analysis tool, you might not immediately notice specific patterns or certain types of links. Look for unusual patterns such as adult and pharma anchor text phrases in new links, or a high volume of links you cannot attribute to any of your marketing activities. These types of links may indicate a negative SEO attack implemented by someone using a spam tool, or possibly someone using a network of sites.
If someone is using a network of sites (or blog network) in their attack against you, you may want to give a little visual context to your link data and graph those links using a tool like TouchGraph.com or Gephi.org. These tools will give you a visual representation of your inbound links and allow you to spot patterns and footprints. This is much easier than sorting through mountains of data in a spreadsheet.
I have listed the more common negative SEO attack vectors, but for the purposes of introductory data collection, this is enough. The main reason for listing the various steps toward creating a list of attacking sites and ways to stop an attack is to show your attacker you are willing and capable of finding him or her. This makes your site a less appealing victim in the future.
Once you have collected the list of offending IPs and domains, you can attempt to unmask your attacker manually by combing through WHOIS domain registrations and zone files (a text file that exists to describe a DNS zone) looking for registration commonalities. By far the best service to help someone looking to find the person behind a set of IPs and domains is BitDiscovery.com, run by two very famous white-hat hackers, Jeremiah Grossman and Robert Hansen.
Here are the most important types of attacks you should be aware of. You cannot take actions against negative SEO unless you know what to look for and how the attacker is trying to lower your page rank using unethical practices.
Below you can see an example of link farming from one of our clients who received more than 15,500 spammy links in just one month through a negative SEO campaign. In just a couple of month, Carvaka started to experience a drop in traffic and in rankings, going from the first page on the fifth page.
Negative OnPage SEO attacks are more difficult to implement because they involve hacking your website and getting access to its administration panel. However, you should be aware that such attacks can occur at any time, especially if you are not updating your CMS regularly, thus leaving it vulnerable to external access through scripts and other hacking software. How such attacks can hurt your website and implicitly your business?
3. Update your content management system regularly: WordPress and other popular CMSs are constantly updated in order to correct bugs and vulnerabilities and prevent exploits and hacks. If you are running a customs content management system, it will probably cost you to make updates whenever a vulnerability is found but they are money well spent. The costs of recovery from a negative SEO attack on your website are exponentially higher. Also, if you are using plugins with your CMS, update them as well and try to limit their use to just a few. Verify the sources of these plugins and only install scripts compiled by trusted companies.
7. Verify for duplicate content: Use tools such as Copyscape and determine whether or not you have been a victim of a negative SEO attack of this sort. In some cases, the removal of the copied article will be enough. However, if you want to be thorough, you may need to contact Google and file a copyright infringement report.
8. Monitor your link profile growth: Verify how many websites link back to your website, how the back linking grows and the number of referring domains. If the backlinks are suddenly starting to grow exponentially, verify if they are legit or not and take immediate action in case you are suspicious. If you do not pay attention and let an attack to take its course, it may be too late to take action once the damage is already done.
12. Monitor your backlinks: You will get regular updates on your website profile, the websites that are linking back to you and, at the same time, the status of your competition. With the cognitiveSEO Tool you can set up alerts for new links and know exactly when an attack starts and how big it is.
Well, prevention has been the best cure known to mankind since the dawn of civilization. I have already talked about this topic in the previous chapter so I am only going to state here some important tips you should follow after a negative SEO attack:
Disavow links: Matt Cutts and John Mueller recommend the Disavow Tool. Fortunately, Google has made things simple for webmasters who are suspicious about back links to their websites. You can use this tool available in Webmaster Tools in order to disavow all the links you find and seem to be unnatural for your website. As long as you do it in time, you will not face major problems. However, you can do it also after you become aware of a negative SEO attack. If you do get penalized before you manage to disavow the bad links, the reconsideration request can take longer, especially if it was a manual penalty. The cognitiveSEO tool can help you quickly generate disavow files that can be easily uploaded to Google.
What do you know about negative SEO attacks? Were you attacked by competitors in this way? How did you managed to restore your rankings and maybe, your credibility? Please tell me more of your related experiences in the comments section available below. I am more than eager to learn more about this topic and I am sure our readers are searching for new data as well.
The article is really helpful to make sure you are not hit by negative SEO. But these days spammers have become smart. They block most of the crawlers mentioned in the article and hence you cannot be sure unless your traffic starts falling.
We believe in being good citizens and do not help people implement negative SEO attacks on their competitors. We do, however, provide services to help people mitigate SEO attacks. Click here "suspected SEO attack" or call us directly at +1 801 349 8226 to get help.
When it comes to negative SEO, at 200,000 links for $10, link spam is just the low-cost commodity tactic. There are lots more devious and insidious tactics. Here are a few, but by no means a comprehensive list of examples.
Bear in mind that the negative SEO tactics mentioned above are by no means a comprehensive list. Just like professional burglars will evolve their techniques for gaining entry into a property, negative SEO specialists constantly come up with new tactics.
Negative SEO is a controversial topic in the SEO space. You hear about it a lot, but does it happen quite so often? How easy is it to ruin a competitor's rankings? Could it be the reason your rankings suddenly dropped? Should you be worried? How do you know if someone is trying to knock you out of SERPs with negative SEO? Is there anything you can do to stay safe? Let's take these questions one by one.
In April 2012, Google launched the Penguin update, and, for the first time, they would be taking strong punitive action against sites with manipulative links. It meant you could no longer use low-quality links to rank your website. At the same time, it meant you could buy low-quality links for your competitor's website and have it penalized by Google. That's when negative SEO took off:
Today, most websites are completely safe from negative SEO attacks. Google has gotten pretty good at catching spammy backlink blasts, so these types of attacks are unlikely to influence your rankings even if they happen. So, if you see your rankings suddenly drop, then make sure to go through a checklist of common reasons before you blame a negative SEO attack.
In fact, you are more likely to fall victim to a negative SEO attack mounted from within your own company. For example, you might make the mistake of hiring an inexperienced SEO specialist, who will build a ton of low-quality backlinks to your website, or spam your comment section, or pay for fake reviews. Or you might hire a dishonest writer who will plagiarize most of their copy from other websites. Realistically, these types of negative SEO "attacks" pose a much higher risk than an actual attack from your competitor.
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