As part of our SEJ interview series I recently caught up with Bob Rains from CBS Interactive to discuss negative SEO and black hat SEO.
In the video below, Bob gives an overview of what’s going on in the world of negative SEO and what we can do to protect ourselves against it.
Here are some key takeaways from the video:
- One of the misconceptions out there about negative SEO is that it’s purely a links game. One thing that SEOs aren’t necessarily watching is manipulation of page speed and other technical factors that could adversely affect a site’s SEO.
- A lot of today’s negative SEO attacks involve attacking a site’s page speed to try to slow it down. Some of the heavy malicious stuff involves using injectable headers that can either break your page or make your page look like malware so no one would want to visit it.
- The reality is, Bob explains, that SEO isn’t purely a link game, so why should negative SEO be purely a link game?
- How do you protect yourself from negative SEO attacks? Bob says staying on top of negative SEO is a lot like how you would monitor your inbound links and looking for spammy pages. Monitor your pages by looking at the code and seeing if there have been any recent updates to the code.
- One of the biggest ways of finding out if someone has put something malicious into your site is spotting an update to the code that has no traces in your log files. Look for things that are outside of regular protocol, and investigate any changes in site speed.
For more video interviews please visit SEJ’s YouTube page.
Category
SEO
