Your Competitors Could Ruin Your Business’ Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

On October 4th, 2019 / By Hamzah Khadim

Understanding the level of complexity and detail for good SEO strategies is challenging enough on its own, let alone having to worry about potential things your competitors could do to actually hurt your search engine placement (SERP) and offset any SEO solutions you are using. While most businesses tend to avoid using these types of unsavory business practices, there are still others out there, who would not think twice about being able to displace your top SERP.

Let’s take a look at some of the methods your competition might attempt to use to hurt you and your business.

301 Redirect to Your Website

If a competitor has been “dinged” for unacceptable practices and is being penalized by Google, they could use a 301 redirect to your site. This results in the backlinks from those penalized pages getting carried over and could result in your site also being penalized.

Backlinks

Competitors could attempt to get your backlinks removed from other websites where they are featured. Another thing they do is to link your site to low quality, adult, or spammy backlinks. Initially, you may not notice any change in your SERP, but eventually, this practice will hurt you.

User Generated Content

Enabling comments on your site pages is sometimes risky. Your competitors could use methods to either add negative content to these pages, which could result in the page being filtered from search engines, or adding positive content in such a manner it reduces the effectiveness of keywords.

Review Websites

Your competition could post negative reviews about your business, it’s products and/or services. These could have an impact on your SERP, so it is vital you monitor online reviews frequently to see what is being posted.

Index Crawling

Sometimes your pages will not index correctly for various reasons. One practice your competitors might try to use is to attempt to steal your crawling budget. This is where automated “bots” try to access a page. If they are getting page errors or not able to reach the page this hurts your SERP. Competitors could take steps so that the “bots” are continuously hitting duplicate pages, pages with errors, and so on for an extended period of time to lower your SERP.

Duplicating Content

Another poor practice is where a competitor will essentially copy your page content and post it on another site they created. When search engines index duplicated content, it hurts your placement in search results.

How do you uncover when your website is under attack by outside forces, beyond your control? You need to make sure to stay on top of specific activities, like monitoring site traffic, confirming backlinks, and more on a regular basis. Managing this aspect of your website often requires outside help from a top SEO professional in Toronto, like us, here at Logik Digital. For a FREE website analysis and assistance monitoring your pages, contact Logik Digital at 1-866-307-0086 today!