Posted On : 06 February 2019
Among our six-part series on negative SEO, this is the last article which I am introducing to you. If you have read the previous article, you might have understood now what negative SEO actually is. You have examined your condition to check whether you were hit or not and also, you are aware how to decrease your possibility of being a victim in the time to come. You also know how to strive and protect yourself from an existing negative SEO campaign. Now, here the time came to clear up the issues.
This article will act as a supportive section of the preceding articles in the series. That is why we would once again classify the process of recovery into three important parts such as content, links, and user signals. The great news is that one can overcome the attacks in any of those parts and the bad news about it is that the process of recovery could be lengthy which will depend upon the kind of negative activity that you are trying to recover from.
Inbound links
The very first procedure is to create a disclaimed file of the most harmful links which you have recognized in your survey of the attack. You can discover more about how to build the actual file here. As the article is instructive and even I feel psychologically a larger file looks preferable hence I suggest listing full URLs in the place of root domains.
Next, if the negative SEO attack ended up in a manual action, you will require crafting a reconsideration request. Show honesty to describe how you discovered regarding the attack. Also, give any proof which is available in the form of screenshots which exhibit that these links were placed by a third party and not by you; and describe how you have strived to clear up the issues including disclaiming.
You will need to exhibit many trials to contact the webmasters who are hosting the "poor" links focusing on your web pages and you should get opposition from Google disclaiming your reconsideration requests. The proof which you will submit to both webmasters and Google, mention in that the links are harming your good name and you did not make any request to them.
If the penalty which you have evaluated is algorithmic in nature, you might require waiting till the Google deal with the disclaimed file and making a choice to fold the information back to its original calculations. In order to make it faster, you can opt for accelerating Google’s drag of those URLs once you have disclaimed the URLs. Even if there are many ways to do this task, my favorite one is to form an RSS file with the unwanted URLs and submit the file to various RSS aggregation websites.
Injected content and links
Before you proceed with the article, I suggest you look back to our post on proactive prevention because the cleaning process of most of the hacks includes upgrading security through patching your server or going with the dedicated host.
In the same way, upgrade your robots.txt to make sure that you mark only the portions of your website which you desire to be marked. I also intensively recommend turning off the comments in case if you do not actually want comments on your website.
Just assume if you were hacked by showing either a security issue or a manual action in the type of a link penalty, you will require notifying about your efforts to the Google to troubleshoot the hack. Fortunately, Google responds in the case of settling notification of hacked website and will set the penalty flag again as usual.
Unluckily, a hacked result is being labeled simply means that you will need t do more cleanup from the time it will have poorly affected your user signals. Majority of the sites are hacked for the purposes of search results and also result in complying as exploitative landing pages for the hacking people hence you will need to handle the condition just like link penalty issue.
User signals
It is a very simple process to conceptualize once an attack of cleaning up user signal issues that have stopped. In order to solve bounce rates and artificially bad click-through rates (CTRs), you require gaining more clicks with extended dwell time.
How do you do this?
Contemplate undertaking a contest on your social networks. New beginners of the contests are needed to undertake few nominal actions such as filling out a form and navigating to your website. This regards as the same as to a brand question in Google which is followed by a single click and then followed by a completion of a form.
Move on a positive public relations campaign for something not related to the attack: You can offer anything positive to the influencers as well as local media who will assist to promote the source like you can promote an employee, provide to your favorite charities, or declare a new product. These attempts will result to come back as a positive value to your website.
Troubleshoot bad user signals and enhance your website : This will indeed take longer time but it will assist to enhance your total linking tactic and content.
It is not the case of what type of attack used against a website, it is the thing that I would like to suggest post-cleanup which is used to push forward with an upgraded marketing tactic. You might have read in one of my earlier articles in which it is suggested to make alterations to your website to decline attack vectors. Attack vectors will find difficult to harm your website from a search point of view if it is reliable and strong.
Then what is the need to place a new content marketing tactic at this very point? A winning content marketing strategy emerges in the formation of valuable content that is made to structure a brand and evoke links and users. A post-cleanup content marketing tactic will help to improve the website's inbound link profile, user signals, and indexable content which will thereby reduce the risks of future attacks.
A negative SEO content strategy method
Here is the procedure to diminish risk and our process of recovery.
● Recognize the top three among the ten competitors for your site. We will call as “competitors” to this group of websites (including your own).
● Extract ranking information to discover for which search phrases your competitors will rank.
● Extract your competitors' search phrases and compute a value from a perspective of PPC with the use of Google Ads tools to find out potential user worth.
Look for the backlinks in every page of your competitor’s website that has come in the top 100 Google rankings.
● Make the group of the keywords and phrases of your competitor logically so that you can form your own dependable content constituted of similar phrases.
● By discovering the highest value keywords or phrases and short competition, rank the content development priorities. You can use the information from Google Ads to find keyword value. You can take advantage of PPC data even if you do not take part in pay-per-click (PPC) because it enables you to discover the highest commercial value of a phrase.
If you find little content on your website which is not converting or out of date after performing your analytics and undertaking competitive research, you can upgrade the link references to a good page and change the content to meet your content initiative. You can also combine all the website content from the non-converting pages to form one reliable page and 301 redirect the pages that are non-converting to a new as a reliable page for forever.
If the content seems to be not worth saving and it does not contain inbound links, take the help of a 410 error code to exhibit the page that has been closed forever and discard all internal navigation.
The very last outline to contemplate: If your website content is pertinent and the topics are being utilized by your competitors, enlarge the website content. To form new content assets and connect to a publishing schedule, set up a content calendar.
You can use Keywordjuicer.com if you feel this tactic is very confusing and laborious. I know about only this tool which automates the whole negative SEO content tactic mentioned in this section.
As it requires social mentions and links to promote and offer credibility to the content, it cannot live in an empty space.
In our next series of the Negative SEO, we will try to make you aware deeply about the future of negative SEO and also the things that you might expect to come in contact with Google’s ever-evolving algorithms.
