A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all • Hacker News Board

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#91

Post by dhimes » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 1:24 PM UTC

will_critchlow wrote: post #67

I can't put words in the mouth of the SEO quoted, but (unless you know he was one of the people making removal requests against your site) I suspect he is not talking about you or sites like yours. I should add that I don't agree with the rhetoric btw, but I think he is targeting a different kind of webmaster. I think he is referring to webmasters who sold links (knowingly outside the guidelines) for years. They woul…

I'm wondering about the graph on Gary's site: what type of business' fortune is linked this tightly to Google's rankings? Is it a particular category, or are there several categories of businesses that suffer from (or leverage) this? That's a pretty frightening situation to be in, IMO.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#92

Post by Isofarro » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 1:31 PM UTC

SquareWheel wrote: post #90

venus wrote: post #31

My god, the quote from that "white hat" SEO guy just defies belief: > There will certainly be webmasters out there who will strip you down to the bone asking for money in exchange of link removals. These are the most soulless snake oil salesmen on earth To say that about webmasters, already victims of years of abusive SEO spamming, when they then refuse to help an abusive site clean up its own mess for free .. I have…

"To say that about webmasters, already victims of years of abusive SEO spamming" I suspect this comment was aimed at webmasters not who were the victims of spam, but those that profited from it. It's those who run directory sites and article farms that would accept cash to add your link, and now that people want the links removed, they're double dipping. And these people are indeed scummy.

If they paid to get listed there in the first place (paid link for the purpose of better rankings), then it's fair game to pay to remove the ranking disadvantage now. I call it an ethics tax.

Paid links were frowned on but not generally penalised. So sites took the risk they wouldn't get caught or penalised. Now they got penalised. So if it was okay to pay for a linkback, equally it should be okay to pay for the removal of a linkback.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#93

Post by Isofarro » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 1:34 PM UTC

bobsy wrote: post #79

dchuk wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what if the site requesting the link take downs was a victim of someone else spamming links out pointing at their site? It's not a white/black situation, there are many ways those links could come about and there are legitimate SEOs out there requesting they be taken down.

This is what I was thinking. Not every site that has had its url spammed across forums and in comment-spam did it themselves. The other side of black hat SEO is destroying competitors by triggering Google penalties against them. I used to run a forum but I shut it down because of spam. It was a shame. It was well ranked on Google and I think this is why spam was such a problem. It was a nice before it was overwhelmed…

"Not every site that has had its url spammed across forums and in comment-spam did it themselves. The other side of black hat SEO is destroying competitors by triggering Google penalties against them."

That tactic (of spammy linking to your competitors) only became a viable one after Panda/Penguin. I doubt it was practiced by SEO agencies before those algorithm changes. So links added before that change are unlikely to be negative SEO.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#94

Post by SquareWheel » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 1:36 PM UTC

Isofarro wrote: post #92

SquareWheel wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"To say that about webmasters, already victims of years of abusive SEO spamming" I suspect this comment was aimed at webmasters not who were the victims of spam, but those that profited from it. It's those who run directory sites and article farms that would accept cash to add your link, and now that people want the links removed, they're double dipping. And these people are indeed scummy.

If they paid to get listed there in the first place (paid link for the purpose of better rankings), then it's fair game to pay to remove the ranking disadvantage now. I call it an ethics tax. Paid links were frowned on but not generally penalised. So sites took the risk they wouldn't get caught or penalised. Now they got penalised. So if it was okay to pay for a linkback, equally it should be okay to pay for the remo…

Perhaps. I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other on if it's moral to charge for something like that. But the Disavow Link Tool exists for a reason, and webmasters can use it to manually remove those bad links. Though they are encouraged to make an honest effort to contact webmasters first.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#95

Post by Isofarro » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 1:37 PM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #70

halcyondaze wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't hate on all SEOs just because of the overall clown-ness of the space :( there are some good guys!

SEO is a misnomer. They don't aid search engines, and they certainly don't optimise them in any way. Goggle doesn't need your optimisation "help". Just create compelling content. That means you need to be open, informative, interesting and innovative .

> SEO is a misnomer.

As much as a misnomer as cat food. Try to think of it as Search Engine _Placement_ optimisation.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#96

Post by Isofarro » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 1:54 PM UTC

halcyondaze wrote: post #80

onemorepassword wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure there's no way I can convince you, or any SEO, that you're merely proving GhotiFish's point here. The ethical disconnect is painful.

I don't see an ethical disconnect. Google is the world's largest scraper, making almost all of their revenue by serving ads next to the content of everyone else but them, yet there is an "ethical disconnect" by voluntarily choosing to still abide by their guidelines?

> Google is the world's largest scraper, making almost all of their > revenue by serving ads next to the content of everyone else but them,

That's oversimplifying the service and value Google offers. This is the typical passive-aggressive SEO stance. Deriding Google for the service it offers, but at the same time craving it's attention. Because you know, Google gives you a steady stream of customers.

People use Google because it helps get them to the websites that offer the content that people are looking for. It's (relatively) good at matching seekers with the information they seek. That's what brings people back to Google over and over.

And so, the page they deliver has value to people.

Yes, they scrape content from everyone else. Including themselves (e.g. a search for "Google webmaster guidelines" returns support.google.com).

They also add to that their special ingredients - algorithms that dissect pages, classifying, inferring meaning, deriving synonyms, inferring intent. Weighing, scoring, evaluating every page out there. So when a customer comes a-querying, it uses those calculated metrics to decide which 10 pages get to be mentioned on a search results page, and what snippet/extract of those 10 pages to show.

The value Google adds is the selection of which pages to link to based on the query and what it knows/infers about the pages themselves. That is no trivial thing.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#97

Post by a5seo » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 3:11 PM UTC

jtheory wrote: post #44

a5seo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nofollow all external links point external links through a redirect like /out?to= and put /out in you robots.txt change your url structure and simply 404 the pages with spammy links

These solutions assume that the spammers have human beings who are actively checking that their spamming effort worked on your forum. I have a forum where I've been battling spam for years, and since the beginning all external links have been nofollowed... AFAIK this made no difference whatsoever.

That's partly true. But the reason a forum gets on their radar in the first place is by failing to follow those safeguards.

The way these guys operate is they write scripts to crawl the SERPs and find sites that are ranking, then they look for weaknesses (i.e. outbound followed links that don't go through a redirect).

Or they look at their spammy competitor's backlinks with AHrefs, Majestic, etc. and discover the forum that way. Then they help themselves to a link.

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#98

Post by a5seo » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 3:23 PM UTC

SquareWheel wrote: post #90

venus wrote: post #31

My god, the quote from that "white hat" SEO guy just defies belief: > There will certainly be webmasters out there who will strip you down to the bone asking for money in exchange of link removals. These are the most soulless snake oil salesmen on earth To say that about webmasters, already victims of years of abusive SEO spamming, when they then refuse to help an abusive site clean up its own mess for free .. I have…

"To say that about webmasters, already victims of years of abusive SEO spamming" I suspect this comment was aimed at webmasters not who were the victims of spam, but those that profited from it. It's those who run directory sites and article farms that would accept cash to add your link, and now that people want the links removed, they're double dipping. And these people are indeed scummy.

This is absolutely correct. This guy's forum is the .01% case.

The OP should simply delete these messages and move on. But I guess doing that doesn't drive traffic from HN.

What Google has said is that they just want evidence a reformed spammy site has /attempted/ to remove offending links manually.

See Slide 16: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pubcon-2012-slides/

Note how Google wants to see evidence in the Link Disavow file that sites have TRIED to remove links manually:

Here's a sample of a valid file:

     #example.com removed most links, but missed these
     http://spam.example.com/stuff/comments.html
     http://spam.example.com/stuff/paid-links.html
     # Contacted owner of shadyseo.com on 7/1/2012 to
     # ask for link removal but got no response
     domain:shadyseo.com

So this whole post seems like sort of a hissy fit from the edge case of a site that a) failed to protect itself by linking out with followed links from untrusted posters and then got spammed to hell, and then b) gets offended when he reads a comment directed at sites who are trying to profit by removing links when all he really needs to do is hit delete when he gets emailed with link removal requests.

I agree with the comment that this is fair play or an "ethics tax" on people who bought links... f-em I say, since they cheated to begin with and hurt sites who played by the rules and whose content should have enjoyed better rankings and traffic than it did due to the spammers. So whatever hell they're in now is fine by me.

But I also think the OP brought his problems on himself. I ran a huge UGC site for 10 years before I sold it and sorry to say, but if you want to play forum master, you're responsible for defending your site from whatever nastiness is out there. We expect UGC sites to have porn filters, profanity filters, troll filters, and a DMCA takedown procedure, do I don't think it's too much to think that smart webmasters will nofollow links (which is why this site got on the XRumer radar in the first place).

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#99

Post by Djehngo » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 3:29 PM UTC

natrius wrote: post #63

venus wrote: post #31

My god, the quote from that "white hat" SEO guy just defies belief: > There will certainly be webmasters out there who will strip you down to the bone asking for money in exchange of link removals. These are the most soulless snake oil salesmen on earth To say that about webmasters, already victims of years of abusive SEO spamming, when they then refuse to help an abusive site clean up its own mess for free .. I have…

It's also just an incorrect use of the term "snake oil salesman."

Well it's written by an SEO consultant, what's the money he has been called a "Snake oil salesman" at some point in the past?

Re: A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

#100

Post by bradleyjg » Thu, Feb 28, 2013, 4:02 PM UTC

kkowalczyk wrote: post #9

Blaming google for seo spam is not productive - spammers are legion and in constant battle to game google's ranking system, whatever it currently is. This won't change as long as google is used to search for things. There is a solution to his particular problem: better forum software. I don't want to trivialize the problem of writing spam-resistant forum software but it's not such an insurmontable problem (this forum…

He's not blaming google for the original blog spam, he's blaming google for the deluge of emails requesting link removal. Since they are directly encouraging these emails by holding out the hope of rehabilitation they are responsible.

Short of evidence that the blog spam was malicious and unaffiliated with the site, there should be no rehabilitation. If the site has valuable content the owner can move it to a new domain and try again. This time without being a scumbag.