Haters Gonna Hate! 3 Ways to Avoid Negative SEO Attacks

SEO is important for every business, regardless of the industry. Keep in mind that with great success and fortune comes great envy, and this is where businesses fail to keep an eye on the gray area. Competitors can take advantage of your weaknesses by attacking your business using negative SEO tactics.

Negative SEO is anything that could harm your reputation, visibility, or traffic in search. Some of the malicious efforts could be your competitor trying to build unapproved links to your site, or their attempt to break some of your best links.

While we know that negative SEO efforts work well, there are a few things that you can do in order to stay proactive, maintain your ranks, and identify any attacks.

1.  Google Webmaster Tools: As a website owner, you must be familiar with Google Webmaster Tools. It is important that you set up and verify your business so that you can create email alerts that can provide evidence of any malware on your site. Any suspicious activity seen on your website will be reported by Webmaster Tools and an email alert will be sent to you. You can also receive emails on link penalties, allowing you to be warned when someone is creating low-quality links to your site.
2. Google Alerts: Google Alerts is a basic, free tool that allows for reputation management. Every business and business owner should have Google Alerts set up for their company in order to prevent any negative SEO efforts or slander that could be occurring without your knowledge. Google will monitor the web for new content that is published containing keywords that you have chosen and will email you the links to the content that is found.
3. UberSuggest: UberSuggest is a free keyword suggestion tool that can show what people are searching for in relation to your business. Very similar to the Google Waterfall (when Google will finish your search query with multiple options that are commonly searched), UberSuggest can help you search for your name, business name, unique product names, and searches performed.

These three free tools can help prevent a major defamation attack on your company or even yourself. It is important to be knowledgeable about good SEO and negative SEO tactics and their effects. While negative SEO attacks can be rare, they do happen. While “haters” are an indication of success, they can have an unfavorable effect on your SEO.  Keep an eye out for malicious activity and low-quality links that could be an indication that your competition is a HATER: Having Anger Towards Everyone Reaching Success! 

Can a Rise in Home Sales Influence E-commerce Sales?

BigCommerce and their “14 spoonfuls of elite executives” recently released their first report on client e-commerce sales and the results seemed to concur.

According to their third quarter data (Q3), the sale of big-ticket items has seen vast growth throughout the summer months of July, August, and September; indicating a more successful back-to-school shopping season for their 55,000 merchants than that of 2013.  

The highest increase in sales were in lifestyle and home, and computer electronics retailers. The top performing product category in the Q3 report was lifestyle and home, which BigCommerce says exemplifies that these businesses’ sales pick up when there is substantial economic growth and a booming real estate market.  

The report evaluates their findings and shows how consumers tend to spend significantly more money when the economy is doing well; spending 25% more on electronics to reach a 56% growth, 45% more on educational products, 6% more on travel and hobbies, and 71% more on home products. The overall average growth in sales was 41%, with an average growth per store at a 25% increase higher than that of 2013.

In addition to the report by BigCommerce, CartFly.com released an editorial on the factors that influence online furniture sales; stating that furniture sales are directly related to the housing market trends. If consumers are not buying homes then they are not purchasing items for their homes. When the housing market is rebounding, it positively affects consumers’ likelihood of purchasing big-ticket items online for their homes, utilizing the convenience that online shopping offers for finding the best price.

CartFly and BigCommerce’s Q3 analysis, fuels the conclusion that consumers are beginning to not only buy homes while mortgage interest rates are low, they are also starting to invest in their homes again.