Are Bad SEO Links from Your Competition Ruining Your Reputation?
Have you noticed your search ranking plummeting recently? It may be time to analyze your backlinks to see if malicious backlinks are being pointed at your site. Bad SEO could be a serious problem, especially if your company is not a bricks and mortar establishment and your entire identity is digital. Imagine nobody being able to find you in their search results for 30 days or worse. That could mean an entire month of none or minimal new traffic and a loss in traffic means a drop in revenue.
What Is Bad SEO?
Bad SEO was somewhat of a myth until relatively recently but the best thing that could have happened was for the people at Google and other naysayers to accept that is a real problem. Having said that, it’s important to know the difference between malicious backlinks and a shoddy job by a hired search engine marketing firm or optimizer. If you or someone you have hired is attempting to manipulate traffic to your site via bogus methods like excessive link exchanges or low-quality bookmark site links and Google catches onto it, you could be penalized in a way that will affect your search rankings. However, if you’re certain that this hasn’t happened then it may be time to employ one of the many tools on the web designed to find and analyze backlinks to your site.
Be Proactive And Fix Your Rankings
Once you have decided that you were indeed the target of bad SEO, it’s time to do something about it. If you or your webmaster monitors your analytics, you might not initially see a huge problem. Or another mistake you might make is seeing it as a temporary problem and hoping the problem will taper off.
Even if you do see a huge problem it would be easy to shrug off the episode and have faith in the good links to your site, actual traffic to your site and Google’s ability to recognize the malicious backlinks and fix the problem. However, you shouldn’t. The best thing to do is be proactive and determine the source of the backlinks and if possible, the person or company responsible for the attack.
Google has provided a method to accomplish this via Google Disavow. Google Disavow provides a Search Console which reveals all of the links to your site and gives you the ability to download these links. You can then convert this list to a text file and upload it into Google Disavow and basically ask Google to ignore these links. It’s important to be careful because if you ask Google to ignore the wrong links because it could potentially harm your site’s performance in the search results.
Another feature of Google Disavow is to request that Google ignores any links coming from a specific domain. Rather than providing a list of many links, this method allows you to say that any backlink coming from a domain (for example anything coming from example.com) be ignored.
Due diligence is a very important part of recognizing and correcting bad SEO / search engine optimization. However, restraint is equally important to ensure that you’re still doing the best thing for your results.
