Do You Need to Be Afraid of Negative SEO?

Opting to SEO doesn't give you a perspective of living in a bed of roses. In your small business, you should think that not all the time, you will experience the “good things”. You must be aware that your competitors are doing the same. Same as you, they also know the impact of SEO on a small business, so they will also do all possible means to win. However, not everyone plays neat. Some are desperated enough, that they are even incorporating evil tactics against their opponents; opponents which include you. And one of the dirtiest tactics that is present in the world of SEO is called the negative SEO. 

Photo credits via: affordableseofl.com

Years ago, one of the best ways to win is to get as much inbound link as possible, whether it is relevant to your business content or not. However, many took advantage of this, in order to manipulate their ranking on the search engine result. That's when the term spam came out. Google, as it also makes its best to keep its good name, has introduced a way to cut this manipulation tactic. It created Penguin. This Google update aimed on penalizing websites that have too many manipulative spammy inbound links. There is a great changed happened since it was first brought out, and many websites lost their ranks on the search engine. 

Days and months passed until all real SEO experts have finally adopted this algorithm, where each of them avoids getting countless links, and just select those which are credible and relevant to their contents. However, manipulation still strikes. Dirty business players made use of the update to attack their competitors. This done through the negative SEO. The aim of the attack is to threaten a business by pointing hundreds or thousands of poor-quality, spammy links on a competitor's website. 

Negative SEO is not a THREAT

Google's Action

Clearly, Google has taken this into consideration based on the video it has presented on the public. Google programmers have thought of this attack, even before Penguin was introduced. They knew that there will be some who will hurt their competitors through sending spammy backlinks, that is why they have built safeguards to counterattack this. According to them, it is true that many perform this threat but only a few of them actually do it. 

The Disavow Tool

As a preventive measure, Google introduced disavow tool. This will give a way to notify Google of the illegitimate or unwanted inbound links to your site. Through this tool, it will allow you to send Google a list of links (or entire domain) that should be ignored when it comes to your website's profile. So, in case that all your efforts can't clean up your entire link profile, you could use disavow tool to handle the work for you.  

When you made a contract with an SEO company Los Angeles, always remember that there is nothing to be afraid of when someone threatens you that you will receive a thousand of spammy links. Google is on your side; someone you can always rely on.