Capital Hosting

Negative SEO is basically a way of competitors or illegal SEO companies deliberately harming your site with the aim of reducing its rankings. The technique which is most feared is the use of spam links. Large numbers of spam links will be pointed at your site, with the aim of getting your site penalised by Google, who see these kinds of links as illegal SEO and not organic.

As it is not always possible to remove these links, what protection is there against this? Google's Matt Cutts has recently stated that Google are aware of negative SEO and are currently looking into it. Google does state that it is working hard to prevent webmasters harming other sites. In the meantime however, many consider this to be a very real concern.

The good news however, is that Bing have pre-empted the negative SEO problem, and have recently introduced a 'disavow links' feature in its webmaster tools. This will give webmasters far more control over links aimed at their sites. Lets hope that Google follow their lead. We will keep you posted.

One such way is that competitors add your website to different directories for the wrong type of information, so if your website is about Office Furniture, then a competitor could add a lot of links to the site for Nappies. This clearly is not relevant information and the search engines will penalise your site for this. They could basically reduce your website rankings, which is annoying as links are there to INCREASE your website rankings.

To try and combat this, its is important to keep your website up to date, with relevant information, authoritative and good content and to keep an eye on the links that are coming into your website. There is software out there that you can use, which may be costly. ever, you could use Bing's Webmaster tools, Yahoo had a link search tool for any given domain but now they have joined forces with Bing, Yahoo have removed this service.

It is very annoying to participate in a link building campaign, only to find a competitor is trying to undermine you. If this happens, its surely a case of jealousy but it is harmful to your website and business.

Ways in which you can remove harmful links to your website, which sometimes may not be added by a competitor but by some directories! You have to first write to the link provider and ask them to remove them all but if this doesn't happen, write to Google themselves and complain bitterly!

Contact Retriever Web Solutions for further information on negative SEO.

For legal ways in which to get your website found in search engines, contact our helpful team on 01903 250454.