The SEO industry has significantly transformed over the past 5 years. As a result, many digital marketers have gone back to the drawing board and changed their tactics. Getting top ratings these days is not a walk in the park as it was 5 years ago. With the evolution of digital marketing, there is a new type of menace called negative SEO, and, in this article, we will guide you on how to detect and safeguard your business from being a victim. If you’re serious about coming up and preserving your customer service reputation on the internet, we suggest that you have a sit and read on.

• Look for Scraped Content

Digital marketing has been popular these past few years, but when it comes to content creation, few have mastered this craft. That is why ‘data scraping’ has now become a problem too frequently. ‘Scraping data’ refers to downloading much, if not all, of the content, of a webpage. The ‘scraper’ will disregard the webpage owner’s rights, and, in some cases, they might leave a spam attack on your site.

After a ‘scrap’ has occurred, if the copied data is indexed before yours, your content might get devalued. This would, therefore, drop your digital ratings. Companies have learned about this and have opted to use plagiarism tools. These tools analyze data from other sources. Once a company has discovered that their work has been plagiarized, they report it to the webmaster. From there, the webmaster can have the company’s contents removed.

• Analyze Your Customer Service Site’s Speed to Avoid Customer Complains

One of the most crucial factors in determining your SEO ratings is the speed of your web page. If you analyze your web page and realize it is lagging, you should perform an analysis for anything suspicious. If you still cannot find anything that is out of the ordinary, then you might be a casualty of ‘forceful lagging.’

‘Forceful lagging’ brings heavy data loads to your site, and this might cause your web page to crash. If you believe you are a victim of a lagging attack, you need to contact the publisher to try analyzing where the data load originates. If you are good with tech, you can also search for the culprits on your own.

If left unchecked, the speed of your web page could become a customer service issue. Slow webpages can result in customer complaints like the issue Netflix recently had through their browser service.

• Modernize Your Customer Service Security

Negative digital and cyber-attack cases have risen over the past few years. Therefore, you must ensure that your webpage security is up to date. Fix every loophole in your software and ensure that your webpage is equipped with excellent encryption to safeguard your users. You can also migrate your site address to HTTPS, especially if you are storing sensitive customer data. HTTP is a pe of encryption that offers excellent security while also doubling up as a rating signal that can assist in boosting your overall rankings.

• Audit Customer Complaint Websites

Performing customer review audits frequently is a good exercise for any business, but when it comes to negative SEO attacks, it can save your business significant lost sales. Analyze your corporate office reviews and look for customer reviews that might be fake. Some sites to help you check this:

• Yelp.com is a site that is perfect for local businesses.
• Facebook.com has one of the largest directories of business reviews of any site online.
• TripAdvisor is a great site for travel friendly businesses.
• HissingKitty.com is a great site for general corporate reviews.

Try Googling your business and see what customer review websites come up.

This is one of the best ways to spot anything that does not sit right before it gets unmanageable.

Audit your third-party review sites carefully because a cheap way for competitors to win is to spam false negative reviews. If you suspect negative reviews to be false, contact the review service and see about getting them remove, or run a positive review campaign to offset the effect.

• Analyze Your Social Platforms Mentions of Complaints

People sometimes can create fake social media accounts using your business name to benefit from your online reputation. As soon as you flag these fake accounts, report them as spam before they start gaining followers. You can detect who’s mentioned your name on any social network platform by using spam alert tools. Getting this set up, you will be notified as soon as your name is mentioned on any website or digital platform. If you receive a notice, you will get to choose which course of action to take.

Conclusion

For any successful online business, safeguarding the webpage and digital ratings are of utmost importance because people constantly try to play the system. If you have realized that you have been a victim of a negative SEO attack, you need to first quarantine the problem then alert Google.