Finding an effective SEO strategy is just one aspect of the challenge of increasing your website’s ranking. After you have set up your site, competitors may come in and undermine your efforts. While it may not be just or ethical, this is a reality. All website owners need to be aware of this problem, understand how it occurs, and figure out how to prevent it.
Competitors can harm your rankings through various means, both ethical and unethical, so it is important to understand how to effectively address these problems.
Rating of your site
If a competitor has a good marketing campaign and SEO strategy, they will likely surpass your ranking. You may have put others down as you rose in the rankings, but what goes around comes around.
Therefore, it is important to consistently promote your website using effective SEO tactics to keep up with your competitors and potentially surpass their rankings.
To learn more about competitors’ strategies and reveal all the aspects, it is better to use the Competitive Research Tool, which facilitates the work of SEO specialists.
Not everyone can rank #1 in search rankings, so aim for the top five for optimal results. Your chances of reaching the top are higher, marketing becomes easier, and the risk of being overtaken by a competitor is reduced as long as you remain active in your marketing efforts.
Link Building
In a link-building campaign, it is important to only connect to trustworthy websites and regularly monitor their reputation. If a site’s authority diminishes due to unethical SEO methods like linking to low-quality sites or spamming for traffic, all linked websites will suffer in search engine rankings.
Rivals often use the opportunity to lower the ranking of their competitors by paying to have their linkbacks placed on low-quality websites. It is important to regularly monitor your backlinks and use Google’s disavow tool to eliminate any unworthy ones.
This may seem deceptive and unethical, but it is a common occurrence that many website owners are unaware of. Be sure to be observant and constantly monitor your website for any suspicious links that may be connected to or pointing back to your site.
One way to make the process easier is to contact the website owner and ask them to remove the link. In some cases, they may agree to your request.
Review Sites
Online review platforms provide an opportunity to improve your brand, attract more visitors to your website, and build authority in your industry. However, they can also harm your reputation. If you find yourself receiving negative reviews without any reason, your competitors may be behind them.
Naturally, if a real customer leaves negative feedback, you have the opportunity to respond and show how you intend to resolve the issue. However, if the review was posted by a competitor as a deceitful strategy to damage your reputation, it can be difficult to prove and hard to get rid of.
It is better to contact the review site and ask them to remove any inaccurate reviews. If that is not possible, make sure to respond to each review individually, addressing any issues raised. Readers need to see that you are engaged and taking feedback seriously, as this can help to dispel any doubts about the legitimacy of the claims made in the reviews.
Regularly check all the leading review websites and regularly search on Google for reviews that mention your business name or brand to make sure you are not being singled out.
How to Remove Bad Links to Your Website?
To maintain a high-quality link profile, it is important to correctly identify and remove any low-quality backlinks. Recognizing bad links can be challenging, especially for those new to the process, but with some useful tips, they can be identified without having to spend hours manually sorting through links on the page.
Detection Bad Links
To identify harmful links, you must use a backlink monitoring tool. This tool will show all of your backlinks, which can be organized by those that pass PageRank, those that hold no SEO value (nofollow), and links that Google does not recognize. Focus on the links that are recognized by Google and those that lead back to your site.
Review the backlinks profile manually, organizing them by anchor texts and focusing on the ones that seem questionable. Additionally, sorting the links by social shares can help identify bad links since most of them usually do not have social shares.
Most Common Bad Links to Look For
- Comments that are automatically approved on websites that are not moderated.
- Social bookmarking websites
- Links from pages that have minimal or no content
- Link directories
- Websites that offer duplicated content
- Links from irrelevant websites
Checking Anchor Text
Identifying backlinks can be challenging since they often come from images or are not easily visible to users. The most effective way to find them is by examining the anchor text used in the link. If you copy and paste the anchor text into your browser, it will highlight the location of the link. Additionally, checking the source of the page can help you find hidden links.
Identify and tag any inappropriate links you come across so they can be removed after being reviewed.
Conclusion
As stated earlier, you have the option of contacting the webmaster and asking them to remove the malicious links. By approaching them politely, they can easily agree to remove the links. It’s important to note that the webmaster is under no obligation to remove links, so do not be discouraged if they decline your request.
If the webmaster refuses to remove your link or ignores your request, you can try contacting their hosting company to have your link removed. Just inform the hosting company that a website they host is spamming your site.
If all else fails, consider using Google’s disavow tool as a solution. Although it may take longer than other methods when traditional methods are exhausted and requests to remove links are ignored, the disavow tool allows you to take control and achieve the desired results from yourself.
