In the current highly competitive digital world of business, competitors can easily ruin your site ranking through negative SEO tactics. It is of paramount importance to be aware of these tactics to secure the sustainability of your business. A professional SEO company in Singapore can also work on your site to ensure that it continues to rank high on search engines.
Here are four negative SEO tactics that you should protect your site against.
Link Farms
Simply put, a link farm is a group of websites that are interconnected. That is, they link to each with the primary objective being to enhance the link popularity of each site’s pages. Private Blog Network (PBN) is a good example of a link farm that is used increase website’s PageRank. Most PBN use expired domains that usually have accumulated authority and numerous backlinks before they are inducted into the network.
2012 Google Penguin algorithm made it difficult for PBN to be effective by penalizing sites that are involved in this link scheme. A competitor can ruin your website ranking by using similar anchor text links thereby compromising the anchor text ratio. The exact-match anchor may be unrelated to your niche or may include target keywords to make your website link profile look fake or manipulated. Regularly monitoring your link profile growth using applications such as SEO SpyGlass will help you to stay safe.
Use of Scrapers
This is a black hat or negative SEO technique that entails duplicating website content. Concisely, it involves copy-pasting the main site’s content and copying it on other website multiple times. The recent Google Panda update is designed to detect, prevent, and penalize sites that are involved in content duplication.
Over the years, Google bots have evolved and become more efficient. If they uncover duplicate content published on multiple sites, they will only select one version to rank. Woe onto you if the copied text is indexed before the original version on your site as it will be de-ranked. Copyscape is one of the tools that you can use to know if the content on your website is original.