Black hat SEO is a highly debatable practice and often criticized by the SEO community, but the ugly fact is black hat SEO methods are still applied by some immoral SEO professionals. Earlier, black hat SEO was used to generate lots of backlinks to the client site at a cost. However, now black hat SEO experts can send lots of poor quality backlinks to the competitor sites of their clients. Instead of boosting the PageRank of client site, now they try to harm the rival sites of the client and lower their PageRank.
The new horrible face of black hat SEO
Negative SEO can seriously harm your site and thus, every intelligent online business owner should leave no stone unturned to keep his site safe from black hat attacks. Here are some of the black hat techniques applied by unethical search engine optimization experts to harm the brand value as well as SERP rank of a site.
- They develop hundreds of spam backlinks to your site
- Hack the website
- Copy pasting your website content in other fake sites to ensure Panda punishment
- Directing links to your site from pornography and betting sites
- Fake social profile creation to harm the brand image
- Removing the high quality backlinks
As you read above, black hat SEO procedures can harm your site in many ways and destroy hard earned ranking as well as brand value.
Here are some tips to protect your site from black hat SEO.
Take advantage of Google Webmaster
You must set up Google Webmaster Tools for your website and sign up for email notifications. The email notification warns you whenever any suspicious activities take place in your site. Google sends you mails when your site gets affected by malware, there are server network issues, pages are not filed and your site gets a punishment from Google.
Check your backlink profile regularly
Black hat SEO experts will regularly create backlinks from spam sites to affect your traffic and thus, you must get notified when someone connects a site with your site. There are various tools for backlink checking and you can use any one of them to keep track of your backlinks.
Delete the unwanted backlinks
Contact the website admin who is sending backlink to your site and request him to remove the spam link. Maintain a record of your messages to convince Google that you have done everything before contacting them.
Use disavow tool
If you don’t get any positive reply from the website admin and the low quality backlinks still exist, you can request Google not to pay attention to the low quality links. Use the disavow tool to make Google aware of the backlinks you don’t want it to crawl.
Protect site from hackers
Only a good antivirus will not be able to protect your site from hackers. You should use the security tools and plug-ins offered by content management systems to keep your site safe. For example, WordPress users can install “Google Autheticator” plug-in to make the site password protected. Once you install this plugin nobody will be able to access the admin panel without the secret password.
Black hat SEO practices are not going to be extinct soon. Therefore, you must keep your website content and backlinks safe from negative SEO. Follow the tips mentioned above and your site will not lose its rank due to black hat SEO.