Negative SEO is any action that damages competitors’ organic search rankings. Some of the ways to do this are by hacking into a website and injecting malware or inserting HTML hyperlinks in code. Making duplicates of content or even stealing content can hurt website rankings as well. One major issue is building low quality links that point to a website, which will be further discussed.

Is your apartment site being affected by negative SEO?

How to find out:

Regularly look through your backlink profile, at least once a week or once a month. To get a proper view of these links, be sure to utilize Google Webmaster Tools or consider other options such as Majestic SEO, Opensite Explorer, etc. The main things to look out for with these links include:

• Any new links that are not normal for your apartment website
• Links with anchor text for competitive keywords
• Links from low quality domains or blogs

How do I resolve negative SEO issues?

• The first solution would be to personally request a site to take these links down. Keep a record of any of these interactions so Google is aware of your efforts to clean up your backlinks.
• If links are unable to be removed, you can also disavow these links using a Google and Bing Disavow Tool. Disavowing asks these search engines to not take these links into account when assessing your site.
• Especially if this has become more of an ongoing issue, communicate with the website to determine how these links are being created. With more information, you can report back to Google or create a cease and desist against the culprit.
• Report any negative SEO to search engines by reporting webspam. Both Google and Bing have separate forms to do so, and Google also has a form you can submit to report paid links.

Google is always working to remove spam and, therefore, negative SEO techniques as well. However, they are still working to find the most effective way to do so. The best thing you can do is report to webmasters regarding links to your site and disavowing links in Bing and Google.