Tag Archives: optimization
Negative SEO and How You Can Prevent It
Negative Search Engine Optimization On The Rise
When you look at the trends for search engine optimization, especially when searching for the keywords “SEO 2015” in one of the major search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo, you will see more and more articles related to negative SEO. What exactly is negative in terms of search engine optimization? Thats a good question, and the answer may shock you. The weird thing about this is that many organizations are starting to jump into this, because its effective, at least for a short time. The secret nature of search engines and their algorithms has led many people to start trying to “game” the system, and this latest form is proving to be not only controversial, but also effective. Here are a few things that you should know about this issue.
Flat Out Lies
First and foremost, the majority of the negative SEO options are usually lies, these are the easy ones to spot. Company A will use marketing collateral that call out their competition in a negative light. Or they may use disinformation to confuse customers and clients. For instance, lets say a skate shop wants to rank number one in their niche. They cant because another company has good marketing and has been around for some time. Instead of competing with them straight on, theyll go on a campaign of putting up negative keywords, anti-competition articles, reviews and more. By diminishing the credibility of the competitor, skate shop “A” will get to a higher authority module of search engine. These are usually lies. Its an attack on reputation, but it seems effective in many niches. These are just a few of the many examples of negative SEO that can harm or damage a company. Some are pretty blatant and some can be very difficult to find. That’s when you would need to seek the help of a professional, someone who is well-versed in google analytics.
The Long Term Failure
Even though negativity can get short term success, search engines are catching on. That means that if youre caught posting negative SEO elements, or if your company is tied to campaigns that are based on lies, SERP (search engine rankings page) listings will get dumped out. That means that if youre company “A” as mentioned above, youll be dead last in the rankings if listed at all. There have been some companies that went on negative reputation campaigns, only to get completely thrown out of search engine listings. That’s known as “banned for life” and it does happen.
A Better Option
Not every business today is meant to compete with the largest companies in the world. If youre starting a book store, for instance, youre not competing against Amazon.com straight up. You cant. To offset that, youll need to look into what is known as “White Hat” SEO. Focus on local community, and niche competitive phrases so that when people in your area look for “books”, they find you and patronize your business. Simply put, you dont want to go with any of the negative SEO options. Stick with what works, and dont try to “game” the system right now. The long term optimization cycle will give you a leg up in nearly any niche. Also, if you find there is a negative search engine optimization campaign being run against your company and you can definitively identify the culprit, report that company to Google or the other big name search engines. And just remember, the best defense is a good offense, so make sure to keep your positive search engine optimization campaigns strong.
How do Search Engines work ?
We are very familiar with websites like Google, Yahoo, Bing.
We use these sites to get the information we need. As soon as we search for something, based on the keyword we use, we get results on the browser which are related to that keyword. So, in this way we see may websites which are matching to our keyword. The results are web pages and the box where we put the keyword is the search engine. Its known to everyone that among all the search engines, Google search is the number one. So all our effort goes for www.google.com so that our website appears on the first page. People hardly visits the 3rd or 4th page. So all eyes on the first page.
Search results
So how does these search engines work? The method is quite complicated. Thousands of skilled people are working round the clock using some powerful software and algorithms. All the search engines has powerful database where they keep all those images, videos and documents in a much arranged way. As soon as we search for something, matched images or content appears. For example, an image stored in the database has name, and if we enter a keyword with the same name, we will see that image along with the website that contain the page. This task of collecting data by the search engines from different websites is called crawling. To perform crawling all the search engines use a software/algorithm which is called search crawler. Different search engine has different search crawler name. For example, google named it googlebot, yahoo named it Yahoo! Slup while bing calls it bingbot(also known as msnbot). These bots visits all the websites and collect data continuously. When a website is visited by this bot, its considered that the website is being indexed by the search engine. Once a website is indexed, the keywords found on that website will be shown in the search result. However, the website might not appear in the first page rather it will be on later pages.
So the question is, how can that website will appear in the first or second page? It depends on many factors. One of them is the search crawler visit. The more frequently the search crawler will visit the website, more up front the site will be placed in search result pages. So this is the basic! The more frequently you will make the bot visit the targeted site the more front that site will be placed. This is called search engine optimization (SEO). There are 2 types of SEO. On-page and Off-page SEO. Both are equally important for optimization. So there you go, as soon as you open a new website your target should be how to make the site appear on the first or second page. To do so, you need to perform search engine optimization.