CTR manipulation for high bounce rates (Negative SEO Prevention)

hideath said:

reCAPTCHA would cause even more bounce rate, and it won't really prevent this and the visits does count with or without,
The only way to think about is invest in CTR to counter such attacks if any,
So, if your competitor is sending 300 visits or more with high bounce rate, you need to send more to counter his attack,
And you'll need to keep doing so until he give up in such tactic,

Focusing in getting more traffic would make this more meaningless as well,
As such traffic would be be just a small percentage of your total traffic,
Won't work well with low volume keywords/traffic tho

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bitvalentine said:

I've been thinking of ways to stop bots from hurting your bounce rate.

There are plugins on WordPress that can rate limit and block bots. For example if an IP visits over 100 pages in a minute, it gets blocked.

Do you think this could help with negative seo?

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speedie said:

You can use invisible reCaptcha. That shouldn't bug visitors in my opinion.

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bitvalentine said:

I've been wondering lately about negative SEO methods. Lots of chatter about CTR boosting services working wonders for site traffic, but then there’s the dark side. Using those same tricks to slam a rival's SEO with nasty bounce rates.

Got me thinking, is there a way to bulletproof our sites against these low blows, especially from the top dogs?

I've been digging around WordPress for some kind of shield, and stumbled across Wordfence Security. Not totally convinced it's the silver bullet, though.

Maybe slapping a reCAPTCHA on every page could work, but won’t that just bug real visitors?

Anyone out there figured out a better way to guard against these SEO shenanigans?

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paisawaisa said:

Google is smart enough to understand attempts of negative seo. They take many other aspects in consideration before penalizing any site.

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Old Hat SEO said:

I'm very interested in this topic as well. I have a competitor that has hundreds of sites, basically spray and pray exact match domains. They never really ranked well. But for the past six months, they've been dominating the SERPs for certain queries. The only thing I can think of is either, 1, they have tons of PBN links that ahrefs and other tools aren't seeing and their domains have way more authority than reported. Or 2, they are doing some form of CTR/Negative SEO campaign. Its weird, when we post a new article, it does well for a few months, they all the sudden they have a competing piece on their sites, and ours slowly trickles off the first page. Not the normal google dance, but just slowly drops off to page two where it stablizes. Other content that doesn't compete with them still does well, as I don't think they're spending money to compete on these terms. Anyone with extensive experience, I would love to hear your thoughts.

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bitvalentine said:

I've noticed that there are some bots that spam your pages for a few seconds and then leave. Making your pages drop due to a high bounce rate.

I added a plugin to detect bot traffic and block. Its still early days but older pages are getting more visits than before.

View attachment 304829

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Old Hat SEO said:

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the problem I don't think that helps with CTR ranking manipulation.

The way I understand it, CTR manipulation goes as follows:

Bot/worker searches your keyword, clicks your result, then quickly goes back to the SERP.

Bect the bot clicks and dwells/interacts with your competitors result indicating that their result satisfied the searchers intent.

No further action indicates to Google their search has been satisfied by the last result, and moves their link up in rankings.

Whether the user is blocked or bounced, Google can't tell the difference (or cares) they just know it wasn't a good fit for the search.

If you're saying that bot traffic is dragging down your server response time then maybe it helps in an adjacent way.

But in terms of "blocking" them after they've already clicked your link in the SERPs, I don't see how that really addresses the problem.

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tryshan said:

I manage a website within a tight-knit community, but unfortunately it is constantly targeted by DDoS attacks, or any other form of manipulation. As a result, the growing size of my database for this site has become quite troublesome.

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