From the very first day Google released its Penguin algorithm in 2012, everyone is threatened with the hype of negative SEO within the SEO.

Before going deep down into the topic let me clear some water by shedding some light on it. 

Meaning of Negative SEO

Words of Wisdom: Let me tell you some words of wisdom before exposing what is negative SEO, there are people who associate negative SEO with their rivals firms because they think that they are trying to bring their site down on search engine results by building spam emails to their site, which is not the case in real. This is not the scenario, why do they try to bring your site down? Instead of putting your site down they will focus on keeping their site clean by not triggering unnatural links penalty.

The Hunger Games Guide On How To Monitor Negative BacklinksNegative SEO is a type of inbound link that can harm any website’s performance on search engines. These are the links which you have made from your own below average quality links.

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Importance of monitoring negative backlinkings

  • You will not be able to prevent negative backlinks.
  • Helps you in protecting the visibility of search engine and online reputation long term.
  • Save yourself from becoming a victim of negative SEO.

Find below a step by step guide on how you can monitor your site and also from becoming a victim to negative SEO and prevent your site from getting penalized.

Step 1: Login into Google Webmaster Tool

  • Go to the search panel of any search engine and go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

A home screen appears on the screen, click on the link of the site and go to dashboard.

Step 2: – Download all the latest links

  • In the left hand menu click on search traffic
  • Go to the links of your site
  • Click the more>> link under the who links the most panel
  • Choose the download latest link and choose the format of the download and click OK

Step 2: – Filter the data

  • Widen the First discovered and the links column
  • To make your work easier freeze the top row when scrolling the data
  • Strengthen the individual links by creating a domain
  • To make the auditing a much easier task, consolidate them by domain which helps in sorting the data by following theses steps:
    • Insert one more column to the right
    • Extract the root domain name by using a formula: =LEFT(A2,FIND(“/”,A2,9))
    • Review the duplicate root domains

Step 4: – Review the data

  • Visit the column which you have discovered and highlight all the links that are unnatural
  • Review all those links and highlight the ones that are suspicious
  • Find the low-quality links that can be the cause of penalty shortly. For this check:
  • Links from low-quality blogs
  • Low-quality forums links
  • Links from low-quality articles and directories, and the same.

Step 5: – Review all the links that are suspicious

Step 6: – Create a file called disavow file that will be treated as a hub which will include all the spam links.