If your business happens to be highly competitive, depending much on search engine ranking, beware of your competitor who can spoil your ranking by indulging in negative SEO tactics. This is mostly done in some of the following ways.

By Making Malicious Attacks on Your Site

This happens when your competitor hacks into your site, alters your robots.txt file and blocks Google as also injects spammy links and content within your web pages.

By Way of Building Bad Links

This happens when your competitor deliberately builds bad links to your website. This can be done in several ways such introducing adult and gambling sites to link back to you.

By Sending Spam Reports

If someone feels a search result from your site is out of context or that you are abusing Google’s webmaster guidelines, the person can report you to Google. When more number of persons report your site, Google will check to verify if you are committing something bad such as building unnatural link.But how would you know whether negative SEO has affected your website or not? Well, this can be determined by taking the following steps.

• If you have received a notice in Google Webmaster Tool for malware notification or unnatural link building, there is every reason to believe that your site has been affected by negative SEO (presuming you haven’t done any unnatural SEO to your site).

• If your analytics data suddenly reports a sizeable drop in search traffic, this is a sure sign of negative SEO happening to your website (presuming that you haven’t done anything to break Google’s Webmaster guidelines).However, once it is determined, here are the ways by which it can be fixed.

Fixing Malicious Attacks

Even before taking any step towards fixing malicious attacks (by way of altering something in your site), you need to secure your server, as otherwise your attackers would log back in and make those malicious alterations again.  However, you may hire the services of a company known as Sitelock™ for removal of malware at affordable cost. Alternatively, you can switch your hosting provider to WPengine™ since they have security experts who can fight off malware effectively and well.Incidentally, if you intend to avoid future attacks, keep away from hosting providers like GoDaddy as their security requirements are almost minimal. Nevertheless, once all your security holes have been thoroughly plugged, you should:

• Go through your robots.txt file and make sure that you are not blocking Google.

• Check your source code to ensure that you are not linking out to any spammy sites

• Check the content on your site to make certain that you are not using words related to adult, gambling or pharmaceutical websites.

Fixing Spammy Backlinks

In order to check who links back to your site, you may hire the services of Open Site Explorer (The Search Engine for Links). The job itself is quite simple – all you have to do is to enter your URL to get back a list of the culprits.  The links that are too rich in anchor text or are irrelevant will typically be the ones you want to remove. To get rid of them, email the webmaster, requesting to remove the link(s). In many cases, you’ll find that people will ignore your email and keep the link up.As for the links you can not get removed, you disavow them.

Fixing Spammy Reports

The best part about spam reports is that search engines usually ignore these unless you have indulged in any black or gray hat SEO activity. If your site ranks naturally and you have not tried manipulating your ranking, hundred to one, your ranking will remain undisturbed.

Conclusion

No matter how you may dislike negative SEO, it will be there. Perhaps the best thing you can do to fight it off according to rules and regulations affirmed by Google. As for authority links that are always liked by Google, my advice is to create outstanding content which tends to have natural authority links that are liked by all.