Negative SEO is the practice of using unprincipled methods to interfere with the opposition’s status in search engines. Negative SEO manifests in several different forms. The forms can be hacking websites, building multiple spamming links to your website, duplicating your content, and sharing it without permission throughout Google. Negative SEO can also point links to your website using sinister keywords and toxic links like that of spam websites. Negative SEO can be in the form of fake social media profiles, which can drastically ruin your website’s reputation on online platforms. This affects your website by removing the best backlinks your website has. In order to remove toxic websites from your website, you need to first identify these websites, understand how it is affecting your website, and what you need to do to cleanse your website from its toxicity.
Toxic websites are essentially backlinks
Toxic links/websites refer to inbound links to a website that lower the position of a website’s ability to rank well in Google search. They can eradicate your SEO work. Google has an excellent resolution in implementing measures to ensure outstanding user experience. Google does this by reducing exposure to negative website user experience through high ranking search results. This means that a web link that Google perceives as having no worth in enhancing ranking or improving traffic to your website, it will mark these links as toxic links, making these links useless.
Evading toxic websites is just as vital as including quality backlinks, especially when it comes to your link building strategies. Google evaluates the foundations of external web links to a site. Google formulates measures in the ranking and authority of the backlink source sites. Toxic backlinks can have very damaging effects on your website and its Google ranking. Google has concluded that toxic backlinks are a major factor when it comes to bringing down your search position, which means moving your website down in relevance and ranking. Essentially, this affects its position on the first few pages of Google search. But good backlinks and websites improve your rankings tenfold, allowing your website to stand on the first page of Google search. Therefore, it is of equivalent importance to identify and obliterate any and all toxic website links.
So why should you remove negative or toxic links?
Backlinks are considered as a significant element according to Google. If Google discovers that any of your links do not match or enhance the content on your site or the links do not add any value for your users, and they are simply there to increase your Google page rank or forcefully drive traffic to your site, Google is more likely to classify those links as toxic. Google will then take necessary action against those links.
Luckily, there are countermeasures to ensure effective SEO and website safety. Now you are probably wondering how to find out if you have toxic backlinks. To get an accurate, real-time view of your backlinks, you need to use a specialised, enterprise SEO tool. Google Search Console has an option to generate links to your site report or SEO report, but note that this SEO tool will not show you all of the backlinks to your website, due to the fact that not all links to your site are listed.
Once you have discovered how many of your links are toxic and where they are originating from, you can easily start with a cleanse to remove them. You can go to the specific links that are toxic and delete them yourself. Better yet, if you own the sites from where the backlinks are coming from, you can request to remove the links, but for optimal deletion, it’s better to remove them from your site directly.
What affects your Google rankings?
Your ranking can fluctuate for multiple reasons. Here are a few reasons why your ranking could be dropping:
- Tracking the wrong keywords
- Recent Google algorithm updates
- Your website is new, which could mean that it may not be ranked completely yet, meaning that it needs some time. Sometimes it needs a few days to a few weeks to register completely on Google
- Low-quality content or low-quality links (meaning your backlinks are not as strong or effective as other links)
- Losing high-quality links
- Cheap hosting
- Google penalties
- Most of your competitors are improving their SEO ranking as well, moving you down a rank or two. This is something to always keep in mind and is of great importance to remember
Once you make a few key SEO changes to your website, you may come to realise that you have barely touched the necessary SEO standards that will improve your ranking. SEO is a grueling task that will take some time to get it right. It is imperative that you do SEO correctly and run through it extensively, you don’t have to spend your life on the backlinks, but spending time on it will improve your ranking immensely.
How to improve your website rankings?
The rules for effective SEO has advanced to a more intricate marketing channel. As we are submerged in the industry of marketing, we are compelled to refine our SEO processes multiple times a year. This keeps your marketing strategy fresh and up to date.
Here are some ways to get your website onto the first page of Google search:
- Improve your local keywords
- Clean up your location data
- Plan a better website structure
- Focus your attention more on user experience
- Optimise your website for mobile compatibility
- Use original images – spend more time finding unique and unused images, (i.e. images not found on other sites)
- Use specific user-friendly names for images and shorten descriptions. This will allow Google to improve your rankings
Overall, you will need a good SEO strategy. It will not only benefit your site’s placement in search engines, but also the usability of your site. Improving usability will keep clients and visitors on your website for longer as it will increase the entertainment factor on your site. It’s one thing getting people to your site, but it is another ball game to retain that traffic effectively.
Detoxify your website
Toxic backlinks and websites are affecting your website negatively, it is imperative that you take your SEO practices seriously, giving it a lot of thought and attention. In this day and age, improving your website usability and improving SEO will allow you to be one step ahead of your competitors and increase your Google ranking to the first page.
Still unsure about how to detoxify your website from hazardous backlinks? Contact us and we will gladly tackle the problem head-on. We will assess your website, terminate any and all problems, and implement the best SEO methods to get your website ranking where it should be – at the top.
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