Google’s New Algorithm Leaves an Opening for Competitive Fraud

Google’s 15th anniversary marked a milestone in their very successful search engine which also brought upon the announcement of their new algorithm that was launched one month earlier; Hummingbird.
Although many SEO tactics had to be changed or modified rapidly to keep up with the new algorithm, Google seemed to have brought upon an even more intelligent way of classifying sites.
However, Penguin 2.1 is far from perfection as weaknesses have recently been spotted within it. The catch is that competing websites can very easily create negative back-links and negative SEO for their competition.This act not only penalizes the website, but it makes it very difficult to get back up again.
Some companies recently became victims of this competitive fraud. Potential competitors created roughly 5000 – 6000 negative links pointing directly towards then, bringing them down in the rankings of Google.
Removing such negative back-links is a long and tedious task to take on and there’s no saying when more negative back-links could be added by the competition. The thing is, many people offer to create such links for very affordable prices on freelance websites.
Fortunately, Google addressed this issue with the addition of a backup tool called Disavow Links Tool. This tool allows webmasters to remove the negative links with additional ease. However, for a professional SEO company this tool isn’t enough. You see, the problem is that this tool should only be used before Google penalizes a website for the negative SEO tactics, not after.
Once a website has been penalized by Google, the only way to climb back up in organic search rankings is by removing each and every negative back-link one by one. Simply put, Disavow is a great tool for a site that has been able to notice the additional back-links before Google notices them. Prevention is the number one way to avoid dealing with this new competitive fraud. For the aforementioned companies, monitoring the back-links has become more important than ever before.
The importance of using positive SEO tactics has also become more important than ever before. In order to climb back up, websites need to use more SEO procedures that will increase their rankings without penalizing them. It’s a delicate art form and there’s a fine line between positive and negative SEO.
Monitoring links and performing audits is important in order to avoid negative SEO. It should become a habit for any website owner to check up on the website’s back-links daily. From the moment they are detected, they should be removed. SEO methods should be modified slightly in order to adapt to this new trend of competitive fraud. With proper modifications and use of strong positive SEO tactics, this issue can be prevented.

Gustavo Natotschiev is the founder of an online marketing company located in Ottawa, ON,Canada, focused on enhancing online visibility for local businesses.