The Criminals in SEO by: Victoria Phee

Crab mentality or crab in a bucket syndrome is when a person makes an effort to pull down another person out of jealousy of his success. This is the root of all evil. This happens in our daily lives. The same way, it also happens in search engine optimization.

There are many ways on how to execute this. Here are some of them for you to be familiarized and help protect your website from culprits:

The Third Party

This is when another website puts your link in their page but looks really spammy. This is usually caused by porn sites. This can have a drastic effect on your rankings when search engines notice these links. To be able to avoid in getting in this kind of situation, you should constantly keep track of your inbound links. Google webmaster central can do the work for you. If you already know the culprit, send a message requesting to take down your links.

The Copy Cat

There are two kinds of copy cats in the world of SEO. First, of course, are those who would literally duplicate your work/content word per word. This is very easy to monitor. Just use your favorite search engine and you will see the articles that are closest to yours, if it's not a total replica of your work. If you find one, quickly send the webmaster a message.

The other kind is the one who would make pages with the same topic as yours, only to a greater extent. The purpose of this id to make your website look less worthy of the visitor's time. You can do nothing about this but to work harder. Your website's existence on the web is based on the concept of survival of the fittest.

The Unimaginative Content Writer

It is always better if you are the content writer of your own website. You can guarantee the originality of your work. There is no need to verify if it was not copied from someone else's work.

Most website owners hire a content writer. With the use of the internet as a research material, anyone can write about any topic easily. But this is also where plagiarism comes in. Be very meticulous on choosing your content writer because you might be wasting your money. Search portions of their article in search engines to ensure originality.

The Doubtful Clicks

Also known as click frauds, it is the abrupt increase of number of clicks and no conversions. There are tools available online provided by analytics to help with click fraud information.

The Hacker

Your website can also be hacked with the purpose of sabotaging your optimization process. The main goal of the hacker is to have access to your website and perform some black hat tactics like including hidden links or text in your code. If the search engine spiders finds out before you do, it will affect your rankings drastically because of penalty. So the moment you had knowledge of this trick, immediately delete all the hidden texts and links and pass a re-inclusion request. Of course, you also have to do some changes on your server.

There are a lot more of deceitful acts that are being done online. You just need to be mindful on what's happening on your website. You should always monitor if there are changes and act accordingly.