Negative SEO in 2016-2017

Not wasting too much time of the readers, let us come directly to the effective and learning points. We could divide the search engine marketing in 3 eras. The keywords and link era, the content era and finally user experience era. And in all the eras search engine pundits have suggested the effective white hat SEO techniques and at the same they have pointed out what is negative SEO or in the other words, black hat SEO which could otherwise impact the ranking of the websites. Let us do a recap of crucial points of negative SEO:

1. Era 2004 – 2008: Negative SEO techniques were
   1. Cloaking
   2. Keyword stuffing
   3. Doorway pages
   4. Bulk links from website/webpages not related to your business topic – in short non-topical links
2. Era 2005 – 2010: Black hat SEO characterized by
   2. Content spinning and web 2.0 blogging thus giving link to target page with target keywords
   3. Keyword stuffing
   4. Directory and social bookmarking links – since all such links are built and not earned – so no social signals – Google used to ignore all these link values
   5. Thin content or poor content or duplicate content
   6. Spammy links
3. Era 2011 – 2014: Negative SEO downgraded by Panda and Penguin updates
   1. Low quality links – Google started penalizing all such sites
   2. Thin content
   3. Non topical links
   4. Duplicate content
   5. Few website specific technical issues

 

In the years2012 – 2014, website UI and user experience have become the center point of the Google algorithm and then the bot started to devalue all such websites which are not comply the user experience part and started to degrade them from the SERPs. These are not so called white hat practices but yes, indirectly these are the components of SEO best practices and rest are assumed as negative SEO.

So let us check the latest white hat SEO highlights:

1. Informative and unique content, content could be the story teller, Google loves that
2. Social signals, +ve reviews and natural links or earned links, brand name mentions
3. Mobile responsiveness, user friendly fast website
4. Great information architecture with easy navigations
5. Social presence and links

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