Negative SEO and DDoS Attack |

Business owners worry about marketing their business, so they take steps to make it visible to targeted markets online. But this may be the least of their worries, since unscrupulous competitors pops out from nowhere and attacks their SEO rankings or gets them banned from Google search engines for violations.

Negative SEO has been a topic in almost all online marketing forums where queries are thrown in to know if competitors are capable of attacking your website in such ferocity. Recent experiences have shown that negative strategies can adversely affect both SEO ranking and Google acceptability rating, contrary to what has been said previously.

Google on its own came up with safety measures to ensure that search engine rankings would not be manipulated by the website owners. The penalty is a stiff one – being banned from Google’s search index immediately. Negative SEO practices include the use of numerous backlinks pointing to the targeted site to mislead Google’s algorithm and manipulate SEO rankings.

When the Google crawlers find your site with a profusion of questionable backlinks, it does the obvious thing – penalized you by taking you off Google’s rankings. Most sites that are of high authority – local Chamber of Commerce, local education sites, trade organizations, charities, television and news programs may have nothing to worry about it. These sites have much authority that no amount of negative attacks can get them banned from Google.

However, it is usually the smaller businesses and website owners who are more vulnerable to such an attack. There are several classic ways on how these are done:

1. When you talk about negative SEO’s, you would most likely think about: spammers and competitors whose desire is to bring down your ranking or take you out of the Google search engines. They may do this by using malware, hacking or injections. Hackers on the prowl may find vulnerabilities in your security FTP logins for them to easily attack it.

Hackers may come in and inject spams or spam links to alter your site. Another example would be the spammers editing your text file to prevent Google crawlers, or restrict Internet Protocol (IP) within a certain range. What happens next is that you will be taken out of search engines and would most likely infect visitors of malware and viruses, unless the security holes are plugged in.

2. The nastiest and biggest technique used by attackers at present, is driving disreputable links to your website. This issue has been discussed in a number of forums, since it was noticed that a number of sites sprouted up offering Negative SEO services at present. These sites had successfully scraped off a lot of ranking from a number of small companies. Being hit by this type of strategy may not get you banned from Google right away, but it can sure pull your ranking status a couple of ladders down.

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Negative SEO and DDoS Attack