Defending Against Black Hat and Negative SEO Tactics - Dealing with Black Hat and Negative SEO
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So what do you do if a black hat SEO is directly or indirectly attacking your site’s position in the SERPs? Diane Aull came up with five possible approaches, based on how one would deal with a schoolyard bully. There is no telling which approach – if any – would be successful. Her suggestions would probably work best when dealing with someone who is not targeting your site with negative SEO, but rather engaging in black hat SEO to increase his or her own site’s ranking in the SERPs, thus driving yours down. You might want to consider combining several tactics for the best chance of ameliorating the problem.
First, you can ignore what is happening, as bullied children are often told to ignore the bully. From personal experience and the anecdotes I’ve heard, that approach never works in the schoolyard. And it’s hardly the one you want to take when you see your site falling further and further behind, perhaps never to recover its position.
Second, you could take up negative SEO yourself, fighting fire with fire. That might be satisfying for a while, but your success will ring hollow after both sites are banned from the SERPs. Like a high school principal, Google isn’t going to care who started it.
Third, you could report the offender to Google. Unfortunately, like the adult aides monitoring recess in the schoolyard, Google can only act on behavior it actually sees. As Aull notes, “there’s no guarantee they’ll do anything about the miscreants quickly – or ever, for that matter.” It could also encourage a black hat SEO to start using even sneakier techniques.
Fourth, you could avoid the bully. This is not the same thing as ignoring him. You simply make sure you aren’t where he is. In terms of SEO, you start targeting keywords and phrases that the black hat isn’t using. By using this approach, you can narrowly target your audience and start picking up traffic from “long tail” searches. You can also work on making your site more inviting to visitors, so when you do get that traffic they’re more likely to convert.
Fifth, you could work at becoming popular, and having enough people around you all the time that it scares off the bully. Aull’s explanation of this approach is worth quoting at length; she advocates becoming “a valued member of the web ‘community’ by linking generously, taking advantage of social networking, and developing useful content, resources and tools that others will naturally want to link to. The more ‘web friends’ you have linking to your pages, the stronger your pages will be, and the more sources of traffic you’ll have that don’t depend on the search engines. When you get the bulk of your traffic through non-search sites, there’s less chance the bully’s tactics can hurt you.”
It’s not fun when your site starts dropping in the SERPs, especially if you’ve checked everything pertaining to your site and you’re absolutely certain it isn’t your fault. I hope I’ve given you some ideas as to what you can do about it.
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