WHAT IS BLACK HAT SEO COMBAT IT
Many probably don't know it, but SEO doesn't just have a silver lining. We must also talk about the negative actions that they can sometimes carry out against us to hinder our positioning strategy. We are talking about black hat SEO or black hat SEO , which can make your page start to drop positions.
How do we know when we are falling victim to a black hat SEO strategy ? What can you do if you have already suffered a negative SEO attack? In this post we want to give you some tips so that, if you have seen yourself in this case, you will see that the solution exists.
How do you know if you have been a victim of black hat
SEO?
The first reason that can lead us to think that they are
doing us negative SEO is that our positioning drops drastically.
However, there is no reason to always attribute it to black
hat SEO, since it can be due to other causes.
•A competitor has gotten good links and improved his
authority on Google.
•We have thrown stones against our roof for doing a very
aggressive and unnatural link-building.
•The search trend for that keyword was only temporary and
has slowed over time.
On the other hand, when we are faced with a penalty that has
been caused by third parties, there is an unmistakable sign of which we can be
aware.
•Overnight you have thousands of links from negative pages,
most of them spam, pornographic or advertising, without any added value.
•Those links mostly come with the same anchor text or it
blatantly shows that they haven't been placed naturally.
Who does the negative SEO?
Negative SEO can be due to multiple causes. Sometimes it is
done through various bots that act on your page without the author's knowledge,
but other times the malicious intent is absolutely clear.
Who can be bad enough to want to make you SEO negative? Unscrupulous
SEO agencies or competitors who want to position their websites for that
keyword and no longer know what to do to make your page gain positions and
theirs grow. They are always usually entities or people with extensive
knowledge of positioning, so they hope that if they carry out those negative
actions for your positioning, they will obtain better results.
Negative SEO is not an illegal action in itself, because
among other things, it is very difficult to detect who it was. However, it is
an unethical practice, since it tries to manipulate Google results through
activities that can lower positions in Google.
However, you always have to know that, even if someone
deliberately manipulates the results, in the end Google puts everyone on their
site. Who really offers valuable content for the user gets good results, even
if someone tries to do black hat SEO.
What to do if your business website or blog has been the
victim of negative SEO?
This is the point where many feel confused and disoriented.
If they have put thousands of links on pages that we do not control, what can
we do to eliminate them? How to get our page back to what it was?
It will take a while towards get back to your initial
rankings for the Google algorithm to stop detecting weird stuff. But there is
no doubt that if you get black hat SEO, you have to take steps to fix it.
Through Google's Disavow Links tool , which you will find in
your Google Search Console, you can disavow a list of links that you consider
negative. Be careful, this tool does not necessarily mean that Google will stop
taking these links into account. It means that you are informing Google that
you do not want it to take into account those links to your page.
Now, this is not the only method you can use to remove
inappropriate inbound links to your page. In fact, Matt Cutts recommends that
we use it as a last resort.
The first option should stay to contact the webmaster of
that page where the link has been placed and ask you to delete it or make it
"no follow". In many cases, the webmaster will not respond, or will
not do what we want, so if that happens, it would be convenient in any case
that you use the Disavow Links tool .
How to use Google's Disavow Links tool?
As you can see on the Google support page , the way to disavow
links that you do not want is very simple.
1. Enter the Disavow Tool page.
2. Select your website.
3. Click on Disallow links.
4. Finally, upload a UTF-8 encoded .txt file with the list of links you want to disable.