Five Best Tools to Discover and Locate Negative SEO Activity

Five Best Tools to Detect any Negative SEO against Your Site

These days, people in the SEO industry are debating on negative SEO, asking questions such as whether it really exists, if it exists, then how can I discover and detect any negative SEO activity done against my website. Also, people define it in a variety of ways and most of them say that negative SEO occurs when someone makes attempt to lower a website’s ranking in Google or any other search engine. Some people consider it the wicked attempts of your competitors to either steal the high quality links from your site or build shady links to your website.

Other malicious strategies implemented your competitors to “harm” you include content theft, website hacking, brand impersonation and many more. In general, negative SEO is anything that could harm your search engine visibility, reputation or organic search traffic to your site. Even Google has admitted that a competitor can harm your search ranking or having your site removed from Google index. With that in mind, here are some proven and tested tools you can use to discover and locate negative SEO activity, and the harm it does to your site and brand.

• Google Webmaster Tools – As you know, this every webmaster’s favorite SEO tool which can be used for monitor traffic patterns, keyword research, site speed monitoring, authorship statistics and so on. Once you set up your own Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) account and verified your site, you can sign up for email alerts under Webmaster Tools Preferences. If there is evidence of malware attack on your website, GWT will alert you and also, when someone hacks your site, Google will mark it as infected in its search engine results. Furthermore, GWT will alert you to manually link penalties and if someone has launched a negative SEO activity against your site using cheap quality links, Google will notify you. You need to start disavowing the links sooner you know Google has penalized your site. 

• Google Alerts – It is another useful tool from the internet search giant and it will email you or update an RSS feed each time it finds competitor mentions you are monitoring in Google search results. With Google Alerts, you can do some basic online reputation monitoring even if you don’t suspect that anyone is targeting you in a negative SEO campaign. Also, you can use this tool to stay on top of any mentions of your business, consisting of discussions, reviews and uses of your brand name in a negative light. 

• Trackbacks – Your website’s online presence can be harmed by stealing content if it manages to outrank your site content. Using internal links and trackbacks from your CMS platform, you can find out who is stealing your content. When you posted a new blog or an article, you need to simply link it to an older blog post within your site. Your WordPress or Joomla CMS platform will notify you that you have received a trackback to the older post each time someone republishes your new blog post. 

• Cyfe – If you are busy and do not want to take the time to go from one SEO tool to the next to monitor your presence in search engine results. Here is where Cyfe play its role. Rather logging into Google Webmaster Tools, Analytics and your favorite keyword ranking tool, you can get all of the information in a single dashboard. Cyfe is especially convenient for those who are monitoring multiple sites and multiple clients. To see the status for every site at once, you can set up a Cyfe dashboard. 

• Rival IQ – Rival IQ allows you to monitor your search result ranking for the keywords that drive traffic to your website. Also, you can use this SEO tool to see what competitors are doing to get ahead in search. You will be able to analyze the keywords that drive traffic to your competitors’ sites, their on-page SEO, their landing pages and their paid search strategy with information provided by SEMrush.

If you put all your efforts to boost your site’s SEO ranking and still your rankings going down, then you can conclude that there some negative SEO activity going on, after you verified that your SEO campaign is fully compliant to search engine guidelines. The above mentioned tools will help you to eradicate negative SEO elements and to restore your old SEO glory.