In a video on YouTube, the head of Google’s anti-spam team Matt Cutts talked about negative SEO. Can other companies hurt your website rankings by spamming your site? What can you do to avoid this?
Matt Cutts’ statements are somewhat contradicting. He says that negative SEO isn’t a major issue for Google. On the other hand, he says that Google offers a tool that helps you to deal with negative SEO.
1. Matt Cutts says that they try to avoid negative SEO
He says that when Google designs a new anti-spam algorithm, they try to make sure that the algorithm cannot be used to hurt a competitor. He says that they try to make sure that they are resistant against that.
2. Bad backlinks can cause problems
Matt Cutts says that Google has become better in detecting private and public link networks. Links from these link networks can have a negative influence on your Google rankings. This includes automatically created backlinks from forum profile sites, blog spam and all other links that can be created in bulk with a tool.
3. Although most people don’t need it, Google offers the disavow links tool to address negative SEO
According to Matt Cutts, most businesses don’t have to worry about negative SEO simply because no one will use negative SEO on their websites. That statement implies that negative SEO through spam link building is possible.
4. Time invested in negative SEO is better invested in other things
Matt Cutts says that it usually doesn’t make sense to try to hurt another website with spam links. The links might help the targeted site and the owner of the linked website can always disavow the spam links.
As mentioned in one of our previous posts, it’s likely that the disavow link tool won’t help your website much. It’s more likely that Google simply ignores the spam links. The disavow link tool helps webmasters to feel good because they can do something but this won’t necessarily increase the rankings of their websites.
To increase the rankings of your website, you need more good backlinks. It’s not enough to remove the bad backlinks. Actually, a few good backlinks can outweigh many bad backlinks.
How to strengthen the position of your website on Google
To make sure that Google can index all of your web pages correctly, check your website with the website audit tool in SEOprofiler. You can do this for $1. Correct all errors and then start to optimize your pages.
In addition to the website audit tool, SEOprofiler offers tools for keyword research, web page optimization, link building and link management, result checking, social media, and more.
Article by Axandra SEO software
