Vitaliy Gershfeld

There are at least 10 things you can optimize right now on every blog post you have, and get better SEO results from in the process. I’ll show you how.

Here is actually the list of things I’ll be suggesting you do:

If you want, you’re welcome to go ahead and apply them right now, but you need to be smart about it and if you’re not experienced enough, read through this whole page please so you know how to intelligently apply these tips.

The reason you even want to do this is, is because you can improve your existing rankings quite easily in the process. Imagine your site only getting about 10% of the potential traffic it could be getting, organically.

Any Google result that is on page 2 and down will get 95% LESS traffic than a post ranked on the first page. 

That is the reality most bloggers face today and I was part of that majority. 

90% of all that hard work results in…no results happening. 

That’s how my story goes and it actually is how most stories for bloggers go, even though most don’t even realize it until they start studying SEO and grab their heads in shock of how much they could have done differently to literally get several times more traffic, higher ranked results and more.

I’ll tell you the 10 ways to optimize your blog for SEO very shortly, but you need to read this story and make sure it doesn’t take you as long as it took me to make the corrections:

It has only been a few years since I “mastered SEO” from the point of view that when I create posts, I know how to maximize the effect of it so that Google loves it, that it ranks it well, and that the audience it brings in to view it, also loves it, thus maximizing every angle.

But the amount of NEW content I’ve written since that I passed that “mastery” period has not come close to the amount of OLD content I’ve had up already that hasn’t been optimized.

I’m only going to use 1 website for reference to describe this point, but basically, I have about 90% of my content on that site NOT optimized for SEO correctly, while the other 10% are.

Care to take a guess as to which of that content ranks better? Obviously, the latter 10%.

But what happens to the other 90%? Do I just drop it? Or do I optimize it? 

This is where you probably find yourself today if you’re reading this and the answer is that you should carefully select which posts need optimization, then make anywhere from 1 to 10 of the corrections that I’ll be listing here. 

Which ones you should choose to improve upon, is something I will be showing you, but the older your site is, and the more blogs it has, the more picky you will have to be about which specific ones you’ll want to choose and fix.

The reason being is that SEO optimization itself for every post you write can add up to a lot of time spent on it and the more of it you choose to correct, the more time it’ll take away from you writing, fresh, new posts that are already optimized for SEO (so you won’t have to correct it later) and it’s the fresh content you’ll want to prioritize moving forward.

So basically, if you find yourself in a situation where you have 100’s of posts that need optimization, select a doable number you know you can fix in a few days time, say a dozen, get it done, write new content, go back and correct another dozen later (days and even weeks later, do it at a pace you know you can do it at), because if you try to tackle that all at once, you’re going to really waste a lot of time focusing on what is essentially a secondary priority, your first should be fresh, SEO optimized content. 

Getting started: Which posts should I optimize and which should I drop? 

There’s a lot of ways to approach this, but what I prefer is doing this optimization process after getting through these 3 stages:

First stage:

Only get involved in this whole thing if you have at least 50-100 posts on your site, that site is at least 6 or more months old and you’re not getting at least 100+ organic visitors a day.

If your site is new (under half a year) and you have LESS than 50-100 posts, your site will naturally NOT have a lot of high rankings because it is still new and filtering through the Google dance.

In any case, people who are in the first category, apply the coming 1-10 optimization tips after the second stage, for the selected blogs which need fixing. 

If you are in the second category, just skip past stages 2 and 3, and apply the 10 tips for any new posts you write on your site.

Second stage: 

Again, if you’re reading this part, you are the person whose blog has 50-100+ posts, over 6 months of age for it and it’s not getting high rankings. Ok? Let’s go:

Next thing you’re going to want to do is separate is classify your existing posts into 2 categories:

Category one (good): The ones which are ranking high, and by that I mean 1st page Google results ONLY.

Category two (bad): Here you will isolate the ones which are not getting good rankings and those will be the targets for optimization. Anything page 2, 3 and under (or basically anything that isn’t page 1) is the target here.

Here’s how to do this:

You need to use Google Webmaster Tools for this, run a 90 day ranking report and see which keywords get the most traffic and highest ranking positions. Those are going to be your good ones that you will omit from optimization (since they are already doing good, don’t touch them). 

In regards to directions, follow this guide (use the old Webmaster Tools console, because the new one hasn’t updated to help with this):

1) Open up a Webmaster Tools account and make sure you have a verified site on it (otherwise, stage 2 is useless).

2) In your account, go to “Search Analytics” then make sure you have the following things checked and showing (I’m using one my blogs as an example):

This will filter out ranking results and display from the highest ranking to the lowest ranking, which keywords and the position those keywords are ranking for. 

All you want to do is take every single 1st page position you have (anything 10 and under is considered page 1 rankings), cross reference those keywords to the blog posts they are associated for and omit them from this whole operation.

Basically this step helps you identify which blogs are good and that you want to leave alone. You can choose to optimize them, but if they are already ranking well, then improving them may cause them to get re-ranked and that may actually cause a lag time as well as it to disappear for a period from it’s existing high ranking, you don’t want that…

Third stage:

Now that you’ve classified the good and bad ranking blog posts, it’s time to look at only the bad ones, as those will be the ones we will be optimizing in the coming 10 options.

Here, you’ll want to divide up the bad ones into 2 categories as well:

Category 1: Bad blog posts which are targeting an important keyword and have good content. Focus on these.

Category 2: Bad blog posts which AREN’T targeting any particular keyword and their content isn’t really that good. Focus on these ONLY when you finish optimizing the first category blog posts.

Now you’ve just cut your workload even less, and are focusing on the ones which are bad, but that can turn good and get better, higher rankings.

Now we are finally ready to start using the 10 options, let’s go:

1) Improve & edit the title of the bad blog post.

Very often people write WAY too much in their title, target a bad, high competition keyword or worse, no keyword at all. Correct these 3 things and that may in fact raise rankings.

Here are the goals for this step:

For character counts, you may want to use this site (I do). Titles with under 60 characters fit into Google’s search better and they DO prioritize titles with under that many characters over ones that are over that amount.

If you’re having more trouble with titles, read about meta titles and making them shine. So yeah, take this info, find bad ranking posts with long titles and make the changes.

2) Do not touch the permalink (easy tip).

Existing blog posts you have will have their own permalink. Even if you make changes to the title, do NOT touch the permalink.

This is one of the easiest things people get wrong. They change the URL of their blog post AFTER it’s been indexed in Google and changing it to something new will make 404 errors. I have gotten MANY messages from people who have had lower Google rankings from making this mistake.

Again, to avoid this problem altogether, do NOT touch the permalink, even if your new title doesn’t match it, just leave it alone.

3) If your meta description is too long, fix it these ways:

Like the title in #1 which is can be too long and needs corrections, the same applies to your meta description which for a lack of a better term is just the first paragraph on your blog post. The longer it is, the worse it looks on Google, so keeping it shorter gets the message across, Google likes it and it raises rankings.

• Keep it to under 160 characters.
• Include your updated keyword anywhere within those 160 characters.

Again, use the character site I linked to before.

4) Alt text images, absolutely include them.

Look at the very first image (the 10 tips) I used above. Right click it, and guess what you’ll see…

The alt text of that image will be the very same keyword I targeted in my title and in my meta description. Do this for at least one of your images (use an image and use the keyword to title that image).

5) Internal links. A must.

Many posts lack proper linking strategies. They simply either:

• Link no where.
• Link to something like a promotion and nothing else.
• Or they link to other blogs you’ve written that are not relevant to be linked to.

While the SEO issues from those 3 things generally aren’t bad, proper internal linking strategies only help to raise your blog’s rankings and here are 2 intelligent way to use them:

6) External links. Also a must.

Hogging all those links to just your site or promotion simply isn’t good enough anymore for higher SEO rankings. You are going to want to share some of your site’s value by linking to outside sites which you have no association with, but are helpful for your readers to click through, read and learn from.

Keep it to about under 5 external links or less per 1,000 words. I did it about 3 times on this blog by the way.

7) More content (words) is always a bonus for SEO. 

As I said above in the image, 1,500 words. You will probably notice the blog that you see rank least well, generally correlate with those posts having not too much content. Fix that.

8) H3 tags (or large sub headings) maintain reader attention. Even consider using H2’s.

Imagine you read through this blog and it didn’t have any H3 headings, and all the text was the same size. Even if I included good images, I assure you, you’d probably be bored from reading this post 20 seconds in.

But because I’ve been properly and intelligently using H3 tags like labeling each of the 10 tips, your attention probably got your eyes this far into this article, which means I did it right. Well that’s what you need to do too.

In doing so, you extend reading time on your content for any reader and this acts as a positive SEO influence. And in some cases, when you truly want to make a big point in your article, I’d even recommend you make that an H2, not an H3. 

9) Keep paragraphs short, it makes it easier for readers. 

Much like with H3 tags, having gigantic page long paragraphs is tough to read. Our eyes tend to jump ahead while reading text as a way of seeing “how much is left”, and if we see more and more text with no finish, it creates a drain effect on our mind and makes reading further, harder.

Keeping your paragraphs shorter will make the mind recognize that a paragraph is about to finish and inspire the person to do it, then move into the next paragraph, which should also be short.

Again, this all extends reading times for blogs, which you already know affects SEO in excellent ways.

10) After all is said and done, update the post date, and do a URL inspect with Webmaster Tools.

Every time a new blog post is updated, head over to Webmaster Tools and let it “URL inspect” your new post (how to do it). This will speed up the re analyzing of your updated posts and show Google you’ve made improvements to it. Do NOT forget to update the post date. 

For example, when I first wrote this post, the date was in November of 2018 but I did go back and optimized it the ways I indicated in this post, and when I did, I changed the date to 6/15/19, before doing a URL inspection.

In fact, I’m currently doing this on an old site I have. 

Those are your 10 tips, before you get to work though…

Know that through these optimization tips, you will see improvement and you will be able to track it through Google Webmaster Tools. However, even if everything is done “perfectly”:

Aside from this, keep your focus post optimization on making fresh content and already implementing these 10 things so you won’t have to go back to fix it later.

Additionally, you should make sure your site is mobile friendly and you should try social media sharing for added benefits, because the points from these 2 things will add to your SEO results.

Final important notes: This is how to SEO optimize your website & articles. 

Although the focus of this post was on blogs, I hope that it’s already understood that…

• Doing this across all your blog posts = you optimizing your website for SEO. 
• And also articles are blogs or pages anyway, so you can definitely be applying these 10 tips and you’ll still be getting the most SEO results out of them as a whole.

Update: More optimization tips.

While these 10 rock, I have an updated list, which includes them and additional ones you should read here if you wish to improve your rankings.

Sometimes I look at online posts that talk about SEO and face palm at the garbage myths being thrown around. Let me clear up 5 of the top ones I’ve seen:

I will tell you right now, there’s actually more than that and if any of the 5 I mention here aren’t ones you’ve heard or aren’t sure are a myth or not, PLEASE leave a comment below so I can clarify if it’s legit or garbage.

Myth #5: Backlinks are the most important thing. Wrong.

There’s a whole book chapter I can write on backlinks and why this belief in their value being high, is wrong, but I’ll save you that time by saying the most important things you need to know regarding them:

Backlinks HAVE value, but there are a number of different things that make a backlink useful, worthless, or toxic and if you don’t know how to differentiate which is which, do not believe anyone who makes a general statement about them being the most important thing or buy these things from people because you may be getting the toxic or worthless ones in most situations.

If you’re on the beginner end of understanding backlinks, become an expert in literally 5 or minutes or less by reading this article I’ve written to help you understand them and differentiate which are good and bad. And this one will help give you more examples of how to properly use the good ones!

Backlinks, while they carry value, they are NOT the most important thing in SEO. In fact, there are numerous factors that are, not just any single one. Now that one has 10, but…

There are 7 things I focus on with my sites that generally ensure those 10 factors are handled:

You’re welcome to disagree with this below, but I have honestly seen better ranking from following those 7 principals than I did from backlinking. 

Don’t get me wrong, if for example, you can get a high authority page or person with a high authority mentioning your site, linking to it and getting tons of their traffic to flood into yours, then that is certainly a major plus for your rankings, but ultimately, those 7 things play a better, long term role.

So whatever you’re currently seeing from people who claim to have the answer to SEO by selling you backlinks, run away those guys.

Myth #4: Exact match domains impact SEO positively. Slightly true.

You will notice that in this I’m covering, rarely will I ever flat out say that this or that myth is 100% false and very often there are more grey factors in the mix to consider than just a black and white yes or no answer.

Such is the case when it comes to exact match domains which are still being preached about as being positive influences on organic rankings.

This myth was actually once legit though but it did lose that value overtime, but the people who originally saw results from it kept preaching about and it became a parroted thing, and eventually as it lost it’s legitimacy, it did become a myth eventually.

Today, I can tell you this much regarding EMDs:

You can still make them and in some cases, you may rank high for them, including for certain keywords, but rarely, will you ever high for a competitive keyword, because the domain name alone, will not be enough to rank high for a keyword where other sites are already ranking for and have much more SEO ranking factors in place. They WILL outrank you, that I promise.

What I can tell you is to read this article on domains which does cover EMDs, so if you’re deciding on a domain name, don’t abandon EMD’s entirely just yet, but at the same time don’t let yourself be limited by ONLY having to go the EMD route.

Myth #3: You need to use PBNs. I say avoid this.

Private blog networks are still a popular approach being preached about for SEO success and there’s many networks which sell these services that make a great buck on it (that’s why they still preach about it), but the very nature of these things undermines Google’s own rules of organic ranking.

Why do I say that?

Well I often compare PBNs to a toxic form of backlinking. And this is because PBNs are actually just another form of backlinking (it’s basically just a few blogs linking back to your website and giving it value), but they are far more concealed about it.

That concealing nature (hiding from Google spotting them) is the very reason why their foundation is based on deception.

And Google has also officially said they don’t like blogs which do this stuff (here is their article). They basically classify this stuff as “link scheming”. If nothing else, and you don’t trust my word on SEO topics, look up Google’s own blog for the answers to this (the link above).

Never the less, PBN networks and the people who push them claim they’ll hide your site from being spotted by Google and will help you get better rankings. It’s certainly possible, but at it’s core, it’s still a risky gamble. I don’t like the idea of having a site run on this type of thing, make good money, then get penalized in an instant if it’s ever spotted.

I know what it’s like to lose your site rankings instantly and it’s an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

Myth #2: Using YouTube videos on your site to have it rank. Somewhat true.

This happens to be another one of those grey SEO topics, because there’s more to this strategy than you think. My position on this is that you should ideally be using YouTube videos on your website that are related to keywords you’re targeting, but you shouldn’t JUST be putting up a video on a blog post and not having any content at all.

That’s what the context of this myth is all about. YouTube videos are great to use for backlinking to your site, but they should not be the sole thing that’s on the page!

You absolutely should be having a lot of content and be using a YouTube video to add to the blog post’s value. If you can make your own YouTube videos, this would be better, but using public videos is also totally fine.

The fact of the matter is that when it comes to SEO, the video itself, because it’s an external link will not be classified positively for your SEO efforts, but it will NOT be negative either, so you won’t really get any higher rankings by just having a video on a blog post.

What will however make it a positive thing is if there is content alongside that video to help an incoming visitor get a better reading and viewing experience from your page (and that will actually impact rankings better). That is why you should have YouTube videos on your site.

If you don’t, it’s not a major problem either, I hardly ever use them personally and I do fine.

Myth #1: Ranking for competitive keywords is impossible for new sites. Wrong.

You’re trying to rank high for a keyword that gets 100,000 searches a month. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could hit the first page for that keyword? Of course it would, as you’d probably make a lot of money off that ranking. 

But there’s a problem…competition. And added to the competition, with all the updates Google releases that destroys tons of site’s rankings every time, you get additional myths like SEO being dead.

And when you take that problem, and combine it with there being a great deal of competition from other blogs and sites all targeting the same keyword too and most of them have more site authority, more rankings, and overall have been in the game longer.

Is this a lost cause? No.

People let competition in SEO scare them away all the time, but the fact of the matter is that even a new site can overtake and outrank high, longer lasting, high ranking sites through the 7 things I listed above and through the Google dance can eventually become the big dog.

I say this as someone who started new sites in competitive markets and have successfully done this and I also say this as someone who has had big dog sites and have been outranked by newer ones.

Let me hear your list of myths you know about and want answers to!

I gave you 5 broad, yet common ones I’ve heard from looking them up on forums, social media, blogs, you name it. I can honestly name dozens more, but I’d love to leave that to you folks. If you have questions on the 5 I have provided here and/or want to add your own myths you’ve heard or aren’t sure if they are real, let me know 🙂

I’ve always known that DMCA takedown notices on a website affect it’s SEO, but it wasn’t until I was slapped with one recently that I looked deeper into it.

In doing so, my knowledge of this particular issue grew far more and today I’d like to give everyone an encapsulation of everything I’ve learned on this specific subject. I’ll go over what happened to me (and why it was unfair), but let me cover:

What DMCA takedown notices are…

Basically, it’s a law that protects original content creators and creators of original images (also considered content) from being copied by other individuals and people without permission of the original owner. It’s basically considered property, digital property in this case. You can view a complete breakdown of DMCA here.

How they work and why they are important:

For example, say someone visits a website and likes a particular picture on it. They decide to save that picture, and then upload it to their blog.

In reality, nothing stops them from taking that action and without the consent of the original owner of that picture, the person can save it, but to use it on their blog would then be considered a violation and the original owner could then file a DMCA takedown notice to have that particular blog with the copied image removed from Google’s search.

Just as well, the original owner of the picture can take legal actions against the copier (I’m not a lawyer, but this is just common sense when you understand how DMCA works).

Now this also applies to people who copy video or text content from other sites and if caught, your site and video could be taken down and you could face problems. I’ve had one of my YouTube videos once copied in it’s entirety and I had to file a claim with YouTube to get that removed (which it did).

So basically, DMCA exists to regulate these potential scenarios (Which happen VERY often by the way) and to protect original creators from having their work stolen.

The SEO effect. What happens when a site or video is hit with a DMCA takedown?

Well…the said page which copied content or the video that was stolen from an original source is taken down. So the way that would work in regards to say…

Google, would be if a site was hit with this, Google would take it very seriously and remove the said copied content from their search results. This is a form of an SEO penalty.

If a YouTube video was hit with this, it would just be taken down and after 3 instances (strikes) of this happening, the channel where the content was stolen would be taken down.

Now let me go back to Google, because when this happened to me (I’ll give you my story shortly), my first worry was that my ENTIRE site’s SEO would be affected negatively by this, meaning…

If I have 500 articles on my site, and 1 of them is hit with a DMCA takedown notice, will the other 499 articles see lower rankings or disappearances in Google? 

The answer is NO. The other 499 will not be affected, because they are not guilty of the “crime” so this is good news.

Now this isn’t always the case, because if the same site (with 500 pages) has multiple instances of copied content on it and is hit repeatedly with DMCA takedowns, then Google will assume the site itself is a repeat violator and will then punish it entirely. 

But this takes me to an important point…

Many times, people falsely file DMCA takedown notices and/or don’t understand it:

This happens A LOT. If you even look at this site by Google, they actually record the number of times this thing is filed (coming to 4 billion soon).

But I would bet many of those near 4 billion claims and take downs are falsely reported. Here’s situations where I’ve personally seen this happen:

An original content creator of say a product reads a negative review of their product on another site. They decide to file a DMCA take down notice simply because the review isn’t positive.

Or perhaps because they see an image of theirs being used on the said blog, they think it’s stolen (yeah I know, I said you can’t use other people’s images, but hold on, there’s an exception to that I’ll explain shortly).

Another example would be if a person doesn’t understand the rules of this and unknowingly and falsely files this report. Here, we’re simply talking about a lack of education on the subject and innocent bloggers and site owners could be in trouble for no good reason.

This is why counter DMCA claims exist & it’s what I filed.

Suppose someone, for legitimate or illegitimate reasons files a claim against your site/video. You have the right and option to file a counter claim against theirs to defend your position. Otherwise, people can just go around, filing claims over and over against legitimate sites that aren’t guilty of anything bad.

What happens when a counter claim is filed, is that the original accuser gets a chance to view this and decide if it warrants their respect or not and if not, they can escalate and take the issue to court in which case, the person who files the counter would probably have to hire a lawyer and probably settle the issue. 

Now in regards to SEO, here is how that process works:

If you have a webmaster tools account, after a DMCA takedown notice occurs, Google will email you, letting you know that so and so URL which is accused of the copyright was taken down. 

It will also provide you with a link to file the counter claim if you are absolutely certain you didn’t violate anything.

If you decide to go the counter filing way, you will need to fill in a form and basically detail why you are not guilty of the said accusation of stealing content.

The rebuttal will then be forwarded to Google, who will then take a look at it, consider it and if approved…

The next stage is that Google will send the counter claim to the original accuser, have them look at it and decide if they agree to it or not. And they have 10 days to do this, otherwise the URL in question is back up by Google’s search engine with it’s original SEO weight intact and at the same time, the original SEO authority the site had is restored, because it already got their green light in that it’s not guilty. 

Very often, DMCA claims are sent out in bulk, meaning there’s people out there who mass accuse sites of this stuff and often, incorrectly, so if you feel that you aren’t guilty, I would definitely file the counter claim if you’re accused, your reputation as well as your SEO is on the line after all.

What happened to me, the story finally explained:

Now that I’ve laid out the most important parts of this subject, allow me to finally explain what happened to me:

Now in regards to my options, I could have taken the page in question down and this problem would have been “solved”, but frankly, I am 100% certain that I was not guilty of this claim and the page in question was also producing traffic and high rankings, so why bend over when I’m not guilty?

Plus, why have this bad mark on my site’s SEO? I’m innocent of this and want to maintain my high rankings, thank you very much.

I decided to file the counter claim and today is the first of 10 days that the accuser has the chance to respond. I am certainly hoping for a good outcome, because frankly, there is literally nothing that they can latch onto to further their claim, but after 10 days, I will let you all know the outcome.

Ways to avoid a the takedown notice:

Perhaps I’m not the best person to say what to do in this regard, but let me tell you, anyone can be hit with this, even if they do everything right, like I did. Never the less, know these following things, apply them and you should be fine in 99% of cases.

Should the situation where a claim is filed against you occur, you can defend yourself and have all the right reasons to reverse that claim and fix things:

Google itself combats this issue very well…

In this last section, I want to mention that if you own a blog and create your own original content, to not be so paranoid about other people copying it and having to scour the internet in search of any sites duplicating your work. 

And that pretty much provides all I wanted to say regarding DMCA and related topics to it. If you’ve personally experienced what I have and you’ve been able to reverse it in your case, let me know your tips for that. 

This is a good law that exists, but there’s people who can incorrectly use it or for false reasons. But now you know how it affects SEO and when and if you should fight it.

The promised update: What happened after 10 days…

As I said earlier, I contested the DMCA takedown of one of my articles and was told by the Google response email that I’d get a response in 10 days (if it was uncontested) and my article would be re-indexed. 

And hence, 10 days passed, so what happened?

Well the original person or company that filed the issue didn’t say a word, and so my article was “reinstated”. Now while that is GREAT news, there is a “counter” to this:

The article originally ranked on the first page of Google and after it was taken down, it obviously lost that ranking. Now that it’s been reinstated, I had hoped that it would return to the spot it was in before it was taken down.

Sadly this is not the case, and it’s currently on the 3rd page of Google results for the same keyword it originally ranked for on the first page so I will be doing these 15 SEO things on it to help. There’s nothing really I can do about that other than keep doing these sorts of things on that article and hope it climbs back up.

So while I am “victorious”, sadly, the victory comes with it’s own steep SEO climb I have to embark on again.

Negative SEO sucks. It’s what happens when you do the wrong things (or someone else does) that destroys your organic rankings.

 In an instant, incoming traffic can vanish, your site can become blocked, and/or disappear entirely from places like Google. It’s an awful feeling and I’ve experienced this on multiple sites before and have grown accustomed to knowing WHY it happens, how to stop it and help you understand why it may be happening to your site too.

The fact is, many people who hear about negative SEO don’t really understand it well.

• They don’t know what it is.
• They don’t know that there’s different forms of it (I’ll show you 5 types).
• And many times, they don’t know that they, themselves are causing it to happen. 

In my experience, there’s 5 reasons these things happen:

1) Your site experiences a virus, malware attack.

Online viruses can impact sites just as they can impact your social media accounts, your emails, your computer, your phone, ect…

There are horrible people out there who seek to destroy sites (they can even be hired to do this, which I’ll get into shortly). They basically look to see where your website is vulnerable (not updated enough) and then plant malware on it.

What can you do?

The solution to stopping this problem is to follow the steps I laid out in this article (#5). Do note, that the faster you resolve this issue on your site, the faster you can fix the negative rankings this issue causes. 

2) Someone is hired to attack your site. 

As hard as it may be to believe, there’s actually a whole industry based around negative SEO where people seek to destroy their competition through hiring shady folks to attack a competitor’s site. Here are some examples:

A person can get hired to send your website a ton of toxic backlinks, which can include links from adult and illegal website. The intention is that if Google sees a lot of backlinks from low quality sites linking to yours, they will assume your site is also a low quality one and they’ll punish yours for it.

There’s also the malware people I talked about above, who can also be hired to do this. 

Then there’s also things like DDoS attacks (they’ll attack the hosting).

What can you do?

Typically if your site is updated and has some sort of security on it, you should be fine from most malware attacks.

If you experience a DDoS attack, contact your hosting company and they should be able to resolve it.

As for backlinks, you can’t really stop people from trying to destroy your site with the bad ones, BUT there’s actually good news in this…

Google has noticed that people do this and has thus changed how they look at backlinks, meaning that if someone sends toxic backlinks to your site, as long nothing extra comes of it (you don’t link back to them, there’s no comments or value coming out of it), they simply won’t use that as negative SEO against you.

This is why when I talk about backlinks here, I speak about the VALUE behind them being the important thing, not the link itself. There is also this recovery article you can check out on SEO.

3) You’re doing something black hat, whether you know it or not.

Do you know what this is? Well it’s simple…

Imagine that in order to get high SEO results, there’s a certain list of things you need to do. If you do them, congrats, your site gets ranked higher organically (ask the expert here). We call this stuff, white hat, and it’s pretty appropriate.

But black hat is a term used to describe you doing the OPPOSITE of all those good things and thus suffering the opposite, negative SEO consequences for it. Here’s some examples:

What to do:

Firstly, know the differences between good and bad ranking practices (see the image above). Obviously, be on the good side.

Do not ever do or hire anyone to do anything on the bad side. 

4) Duplicate content.

Nobody wants to have their content stolen an re-used. It is actually black hat stuff, but in this context, we’re referring to 2 things:

• First, we’re talking about YOU personally going out and copying and pasting content from other sites.
• Second, we’re talking about other people copying and pasting content on your site, through things like comments. 

Both of these things are perfect ways to bring about the terror of negative SEO onto your website and you actually have control of not letting this happen.

What to do:

With regards to the first issue…just don’t do it. You can’t get away with this. 

And with regards to the second issue on comments, here’s my suggestion:

And finally, if you find a website or blog where the content is yours (stolen), you can sleep tight knowing that the site will experience it’s own negative SEO effects from Google, BUT you can take further action against the site, such as legally taking it down through what is known as a DMCA takedown.

5) You stop growing your site and the rankings fall.

In this last and final example, imagine all the white hat things I gave you an example of above and just imagine you stop doing them. You’re not even doing any black hat things, you just stop growing the site through the good methods.

In these situations, what ends up happening is that Google slowly decreases the authority and value of your website and this does lower rankings. It usually doesn’t happen quickly, but there is a declining trend you will see in traffic and that can be considered a form of negative SEO.

I’ll give you an example…

One of my website was actively growing because I was growing it through the good ways I explained. It reached a point where it would get to 300+ visitors a day.

Overtime though, my attention with the said site dropped and it was because I had more important websites to focus on, thus I could not dedicate the needed time to keep this one growing and by growing I mean posting more content.

So what happened?

Well over a period of several months, those 300 visitors, went down to 200, then 100, then 50 and now it’s under that daily. Here is the site I’m talking about the real life report of what I’m talking about here:

The fault is on no one else but myself and this is an issue that many people.

What to do?

Many people who grow a website to a good level, become complacent, thinking that this status is never going to drop and so it leads them to make the mistake I did. 

The solution to fixing this is to just go back to growing the website again. As long as the website was always doing the good things to grow in the first place, there’s no reason to believe that going back to doing that, won’t have the same effect it once did. 

And one of the best ways to help with problem 5 is to do these things.

Have you had any of these 5 things happen to you?

While I’ve had my own personal experiences with negative SEO, I’d love to know if you had any of these same things happen too and if not, and your situation was different than what I described, let me know about it in detail.

Perhaps I can offer some tips to help you get back to having positive ranking results.

Google Webmaster Tools (WMT). This is the free program you need to use to show you what keywords your site ranks for. How does it do it? I’ll show you.

Forget about using any tool that costs you money to show this stuff, and forget having to worry about manually searching up the keywords you think your site is supposed to rank for, WMT will show you all of this in a comprehensive report that is clear, accurate and free. 

This is the free tool I’ve been using on every website I have and here’s an example of how it works:

That’s pretty awesome stuff, considering that this tool is free to use. So now that I’ve showed it off, let me show you how to use it.

Here’s how this process works:

• First you need to have a Google account.
• Then you need to create a Google Webmasters account.
• Then you need to connect your website with it.
• Then once it’s connected, you have to give it about a week to start showing the reports.
• That’s it.

Let’s get into the details so you can start doing this too:

1) Let’s start with the Google account. If you have a gmail account, you’re set for this step.

2) Next is a little bit more annoying, but necessary, you actually have to go into Webmaster Tool’s official site. I’ve included a link that will take you there. Make sure to keep THIS page open so you can keep reading the instructions, because the next steps aren’t detailed in Webmaster Tools, but they are detailed on my site.

3) The important thing to do in the next step is to LINK your website with WMT.

By doing that correctly, WMT will then be able to gather data from your site, it’s positions with Google and relay that back to you. You need to understand that WMT is really a great free SEO tool designed by Google itself and there’s no better program out there to how what keywords your website ranks for.

Here is what you need to do to link your page to WMT.

4) Once the linking is done, WMT will let you know if it was done right (with a check mark). From there, you need to give the program about a week to gather data from your site and correspond it with the rankings you have with Google, then it will relay that to you in the kinds of reports I showed you above.

Now you should understand that if you have a NEW website, then it needs to grow in order for it to get rankings and for that to be displayed on WMT.

A new website that’s a few days old, one or a few pages of content can be connected with WMT, but it will have no positions occupied on Google and thus WMT will show you a blank report. Sites which have been around for awhile, have content and get traffic will show on WMT accordingly.

How to use WMT once it’s installed correctly (Skip this part, I updated it below):

In order to check what keywords your site ranks for on Google, you will need to visit WMT’s official site, click on your page you linked with the program and it will display a report for you that looks like this:

Now this is a report on another site I own and as I write this, WMT has actually released a new interface, which I am not used to and find annoying, so what I personally do is, I switch to the old version, because from what I’ve seen, that old version actually shows you in a better way what keywords your site ranks for, and that’s what we want.

So here’s what you do:

Now after I click that, here is how it should look (and it’s much more preferable, for me personally at least). Now on this report page (the old version), click where it says “Search analytics”:

When you click this, provided your page has already been submitted at least a week earlier to WMT, you should start seeing lines and data flowing in.

Here is what the following page I submitted shows when I do this:

Now if you scroll down on the above page I showed, you will see which keywords your site is showing for. If this is enough, then you can just forget the rest of this tutorial, but I strongly recommend you get more data, which this program WILL show you and all you really need to do is the following:

Check the following boxes: Clicks (it’s already checked), Impressions, CTR and Position. Also make sure “Queries” is shown, because that is the box you want to be checked in order to see which keywords are showing up.

Now the next option is optional, but it’s where you see “dates”. You can go anywhere from 28 days to 3 months here (you decide). When I check these things, I will get an accurate report, the likes of which I showed you above.

Note: If you can do what I just showed you on the NEW interface, by all means, stick to that, I’m just used to the old one, so that’s what I prefer using.

How deep does WMT go?

What I showed you is actually a fraction of the analysis that WMT will go into, but for the specific goal of seeing which keywords your site ranks for, this is MORE than enough.

Now, it’s also worth noting that WMT has a “limit” on how many keywords it’ll show you in their report in that it maxes out at 1,000. If you scroll down on the reports tab after, you will see this:

Now if you have a new website, your overall number will be FAR less than 1,000, but as it goes, so too will the number, until it reaches 1,000.

Now you may get confused here and think that your site somehow “maxes out” or stops showing up on Google after 1,000 impressions, but that’s not so, it’s just a limit on the reporting, not on the ranking.

Plus, it’s also kind of useless to see past 1,000 because WMT updates and shows you the most updated keywords you have which show on Google. 

So that is basically how you do it (or at least how I do it) and this is the easiest and cheapest way to look up your site’s rankings. 

Update: It’s become simpler…

Webmaster Tools has undergone an update and now you don’t need to visit the old version to see your keyword rankings. Simply do this to get that info:

When you open the report following the above images instructions, you’ll be able to get in-depth data on the keyword ranking your site is appearing for.

Do note that as your site changes, grows and even declines (if you don’t do these 15 things), that this data will update and you will see different reports.