Effective Ways to Detect Negative SEO

by Robert James, Guest Contributor

SEO has gained itself some serious attention in a very short time span. No website on the internet can rank in search results without SEO. Where the internet has become an essential thing in our lives, the need for speed has become an absolute necessity. In this world of high-speed connections, Cox internet plans are your safest option to enjoy lightning fast internet at the lowest possible rates. Well, getting back to search engine optimization. It requires a constant check of the technical and analytical aspects to keep things on track. Several SEO campaigns utilize some prohibited tactics to gain a rush of traffic and to maintain the ranking. How can we determine such negative SEO activities? Let’s see.
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How to determine the Negative SEO Campaigns?
Have you ever experienced a decline in your SEO campaign? And actually suspected that it is your competitors doing? Well, if you have, then try the following steps to diagnose the problem.

What would you require to do so?

• A browser with a search engine to find yourself all the content floating on the internet by you.
• Review the user signals from your undone weblogs
• Give a keen eye to Google analytics to review the published content and incoming user signals.
• Also use Bing Webmaster tool to review the content, links and user signals
• Require link analysis tools to analyze the inbound links and the internal data
• You will also be needing crawling and some other technical tools which could help you analyze the content aspects of SEO (like codes, graphics, etc.) and the user signals
• And last but not least, you will be needing a plagiarism tool to check the content

These tools will help you scan your website for negative SEO practices.

See how Google and other Search engines are treating your website?
The most basic step to determine the negative SEO is to see how search engines are treating your website. Well, I personally like Google and Bing, audit both of these search engines to see how they react to your website. Check indexing, crawling, rankings, and spam rate, etc. to see where the SEO of your website stands and what rectifications you need to make to overcome the issues? Also, look for the following things for detailed analysis:

• Find the number of pages from your domain

For example: if you want to find out the total number of pages of localcabledeals.com you’ll just simply put the query “Site: localcabledeals.com” to find out the list of pages from that particular domain. It will provide the information in a rough importance manner.

• See if the pages are missing due to the lack of their value?

Check the source code and robots.txt of the pages to see if they are being blocked accidentally or due to some misconfiguration.

• See if your pages have been demoted?

If the index page is not at the top, most certainly there is something wrong. Let me share my personal experience, running this simple check made me notice that my preferred URL handling was actually in trouble due to the 301 redirect which was slowing the page down. The canonical tag should have been used to inform the search engine that a certain page is a copy of a particular page. The problem was resolved by this simple check.

• Run branded Queries

Here is a tip, perform a thorough search for a domain, domain.xyz and other popular or normal phrases associated to your brand and observe if there is any sudden decline in the ranking of your site. If not, were you taken over by some suspicious or unforeseen activity?

Raw Weblogs
Remember that having access to your raw weblogs is vital, extremely vital. However, unfortunately, it is going to be difficult with the broader adaption of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).
It is important that you have access to the internet protocols recorded on each of the page visited on your website. You can parse the logs and also can:

• Find IPS: this helps you determine if the same group of IP’s are investigating your site for configuration weaknesses.
• Identify the Scrapers: It is important for you to know that if scrapers are attempting to tug your content altogether.
• Identify if you have any server response issue.

Many issues can be resolved by parsing the logs. Though it’s a little time consuming but totally worth every bit of the time you spend on it.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a very useful tool which provides you with great insight within the stats of your site. Here are a few things you should monitor on a regular basis to know the performance of your pages:

• Session intervals

• Bounce Rate
• All the possible traffic channels and referrals
• Check google search console like the search analytics and see if there are any anomalies in pages which are gaining traffic. Also, observe the change in the bounce rate and session duration of the pages you care about.
• Site speed is a very important factor. Many users avoid visiting your site again because it’s too slow to function. Measure the parameters that are slowing your site down and try to make it load faster as it helps improve the position of your website on search engine platforms.

Google Search Console
Google search console could help you determine if you’ve been hit with negative SEO or not. Look into the following factors to determine the negativity of SEO campaign.

• If Google wants to inform you about the massive changes, such as any manual action due to the external link or crawling problems, etc. you’ll find messages in your GSC. Google will also inform you if it thinks that you’ve been hacked.
• Look into your queries from on a regular basis in order to spot issues.
• Look into the influx of low quality or spammy links to your site.
• Crawl errors.

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I hope you find this article helpful for determining the factors that are making your website rank low in search results. Make sure that you use the aforementioned tips and techniques for the benefit of your site.  

Author Bio:

Robert James is an MIS with a vast experience and research in tech and entertainment industries. He also likes to write in order to deliver the latest news regarding these industries and enlighten audiences regarding the various happenings. He also write on Cox Number  of Packages. Besides this, he indulges in MMA fighting in his leisure time.

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