You must have heard about the significance of good SEO in increasing the popularity and worth of your blogs or websites. But you must also be aware of how negative search engine optimization (SEO) affects the popularity of your site or blog as well.

Negative SEO is a technique by using which you can damage the organic search rankings of your competitors’ websites and blogs. And for your website to grow exponentially, you must also know how to fight back negative SEO link spam that can otherwise affect your site or blog badly.

Negative SEO can be conducted in a number of ways. Someone can hack a website and play with the HTML codes or can also inject harmful malwares. Even duplicating content can result in decreasing the search rankings of your website and can be used as a method for negative SEO. Usually competitors tend to use negative SEO against each other so as to rise by making their opposite parties fall in the eyes of search engines.

It is extremely important to judge if you are having negative SEO from links and then put a stop to them so as to maintain your site’s ranking and making it rise further. You must perform a check for negative SEO once a week or once a month depending on how competitive your industry is. For doing the same, you can view the report that lists the links to your website or blog in Google Webmaster Tools. This will help you get a decent high-level view of all links that Google is using as authority indicators for your website.

The other tools that can be utilized for keeping a check on all back links to your website or blog include Majestic SEO, Opensite Explorer and Ahrefs.

While reviewing these links ensure that:

• The new links that your site is getting must belong to the genre and category of the content on your website or blog.
• The links must be using competitive keywords in the anchor text.
• The links must not be from low quality domains or blogs.
• Keep an eye on anything that appears fishy.

In case you find yourself and your site to be a target of negative SEO, take immediate measures to get out of it before your search rankings get deteriorated intensively.

• Reach out to the website and blogs whose links might be affecting your website and then ask them to take the links down. This is necessary to keep your back link profile clean so work on it even if it appears time consuming.
• In case you cannot get any of these links down, disavow those links by making use of the Google Disavow Tool and the Bing Disavow Tool. This way you can ask Google and Bing to not take those links into account while these search engines access your site or blog. This is similar to blocking links with Google and Bing.
• In case bad links keep getting created, ask that website about how those bad links are being created. In case you do not get a satisfying response, contact Google with a report against that site.
• Report negative SEO to the search engines including Google and Bing. Report low quality websites that may be buying links and performing negative SEO against you. Once you make Google aware of your problem, it will surely deal with it.

The best way to save your website from negative SEO is by disavowing the bad links in both Bing and Google. Make your you focus on building up good, healthy back links to your site.

Image source: Search Engine Land