For instance, they can simply copy your auto dealer website content and publish it in several unrelated places. Once Google crawls the content, they may penalize your website for duplicate content, resulting in a sudden loss of website rankings.
Here is another example. Your competition can build a number of low quality links to your car dealer website. Again, poisonous links affect your website rankings.
Here are 7 tips to protect your website from negative SEO.
Tip 1: Regular Link Audits is a Must to find Negative SEO
Regular link audits should be a part of your weekly or monthly SEO activity, either to remove bad back links or protect healthy backlinks. It is also the best way to track altered links or spam links. If link spamming is detected, report it to Google and disavow the links as early as possible.
Tip 2: Perform Duplicate Content Checks
Content duplication or scraping is the most common and easy negative SEO technique which pulls down your ranking. The attackers use your content and post it on various platforms claiming it as their own creation. The Copyscape tool can be used to identify such plagiarized content.
Tip 3: Monitor Your Google My Business
Google reviews are valued and trusted by most visitors. If someone is posting tons of negative fake reviews, it causes very real damage to your dealership’s reputation. Also, this is a clear negative SEO attack inflicted on your car dealership. Watch out for these, flag the review, and submit the report to Google.
Tip 4: Check Your Social Media Mentions
To project a negative reputation, spammers will create fake social media accounts using your brand name. Try to identify these fake profiles and report them before they attract followers.
Tools like Mention.net can be used to identify the profile that is using your brand name.
Tip 5: Always Keep a Tab on Your SERP Ranking
You can never predict when someone may attack your car dealer website. The best way to ensure that these attacks do not go undetected is to monitor your search engine result page (SERP) ranking often.
In most of the cases, robots.txt and crawling are affected through negative SEO. It’s highly recommended to check these regularly. Google ranking software and the Google Search Console can be used to check SERP ranking and crawlability of your website.
Tip 6: Site Speed Matters
For the best user experience, your website speed matters, and it is also a key ranking factor.
Always measure your website loading speed, and quickly fix issues if the website is slowing down.
Tip 7: Protect Your Website
As cyber attacks are on a rise, it’s best to protect your website proactively. Ensure that you update and protect your software and content management system (CMS). If you are using HTTP, migrate to HTTPS immediately for better security and ranking.
For more tips on protecting your website from negative SEO, Click Here.