At several points of time sites are removed fro the listings for using negative SEO tactics. It may not be intentional on the parts of webmasters all the time but they have to suffer.

If your site rankings are drowning and you feel that you have been hit by negative SEO, Search Engine Land columnist Joe Sinkwitz has shared some useful insights.

Sinkwitz says, “Have you ever experienced a rankings decline and suspected it was due to something a competitor was doing?

For this second article, we are going to focus on the process of diagnosing whether or not you’ve been hit by negative search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

If you need a refresher or missed the first article, here it is: What Negative SEO is and is Not.

As you progress through the following steps to try and diagnose what happened, you’ll need to honestly ask yourself whether the decline you’re facing is more a result of your own actions or due to someone acting against you.

It’s an important distinction; your first inclination can be to assume someone is out to hurt you, while it might actually be something as simple as accidentally no-indexing your index, disallowing critical paths in robots.txt or having a broken WordPress plug-in that suddenly duplicates all your pages with strange query parameters and improper canonicalization”.

How to determine if you’ve been hit by negative SEO

Search Engine Land

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