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What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

mattcutts.com

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Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#41

Post by gfodor »

programminggeek wrote: post #27

I think the biggest problem that Google can't fix is that they treat links as a voting mechanism, and that voting mechanism has value. So, there is a big economic incentive to "buy votes" by buying links. As long as there is a financial incentive to ranking well in google and that the mechanism to rank better is to get links, people with money will buy links in the same way they buy influence in the media, politics,…

I'm not sure but it sounds like you are falling into the "Google still uses PageRank" fallacy.

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#42

Post by instakill »

wyck wrote: post #21

Im glad to see the clustering is being looked into, there is nothing worse than searching for something and seeing 15 links in a row from the same domain ( like tripadvisor or other large content heavy sites).

I agree, with one exception: StackOverflow.

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#43

Post by tlogan »

This negative SEO is huge problem now and I'm concern about it.

What some bloggers are now doing is buying links to destroy competition. They don't even need to "order" black hat. They just go to fivver and order some of "panda optimized" gigs for $5 (these gigs just hurt - they dont help). And whola.... competition is toasted...

I hope this is going to be fixed somehow.

EDIT: Also is this is just an "urban legend" or real problem?

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#44

Post by moultano »

tlogan wrote: post #43

This negative SEO is huge problem now and I'm concern about it. What some bloggers are now doing is buying links to destroy competition. They don't even need to "order" black hat. They just go to fivver and order some of "panda optimized" gigs for $5 (these gigs just hurt - they dont help). And whola.... competition is toasted... I hope this is going to be fixed somehow. EDIT: Also is this is just an "urban legend" o…

Do you have some examples?

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#45

Post by a5seo »

austenallred wrote: post #26
necubi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I appreciate you sharing this, I'm shocked that you would do it from your real account. Don't you feel any shame for your actions?

Eh, a little bit. I'm not in the black-hat world anymore, and I'm pretty sick of people pretending like they're magicians or rocket scientists because they can rank something. Google has a system, you beat the system, that's it. In my mind it's really difficult to differentiate between what most people call "white-hat" SEO and what I used to do ("black-hat"). White hat SEO (which is basically posting links in forums,…

Eh, I disagree with your definition of "white hat SEO".

White hat is about earning links. A arms length third party has to give you a link for it to count.

That means it has a lot more to do with Public Relations than Page Rank.

If you drop a link yourself in a forum or blog comment, that's fundamentally NOT white hat. That's just non-automated black hat. That's also been below Google's radar.

This is the fundamental problem with SEO... People like you and me who are arguably 'experts' disagree about these definitions.

Ignorant clients hear "forums links are white hat" and reasonably extrapolate that "automated forum links are just scalable white hat SEO." And then they get into trouble.

I've seen it happen at some very well-funded startups. The marketing team looks like geniuses... for a while. Until they get nailed, then they claim they were tricked by a black hat SEO firm.

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#46

Post by tlogan »

moultano wrote: post #44
tlogan wrote: post #43

This negative SEO is huge problem now and I'm concern about it. What some bloggers are now doing is buying links to destroy competition. They don't even need to "order" black hat. They just go to fivver and order some of "panda optimized" gigs for $5 (these gigs just hurt - they dont help). And whola.... competition is toasted... I hope this is going to be fixed somehow. EDIT: Also is this is just an "urban legend" o…

Do you have some examples?

No - but I heard people talking about that. Is this even possible?

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#47

Post by mtgx »

programminggeek wrote: post #27

I think the biggest problem that Google can't fix is that they treat links as a voting mechanism, and that voting mechanism has value. So, there is a big economic incentive to "buy votes" by buying links. As long as there is a financial incentive to ranking well in google and that the mechanism to rank better is to get links, people with money will buy links in the same way they buy influence in the media, politics,…

How would you solve it then? By putting more focus on social media? They are doing that, too, but that can be even more easily abused sometimes. Google can distinguish between the less spammy and the more spammy links anyway, but it's a hard problem, so they can distinguish it to a certain agree.

But Google's algorithm by now is certainly more complex than "giving each link a vote". A lot of SEO is on-page SEO, too, so it doesn't depend all on links.

It also seems they will be focusing more on "author rank", which means posts written by "popular" authors (whatever that means in Google's algorithm) will more easily rank in Google than those written by less "popular" authors.

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#48

Post by SteveGerencser »

nulluk wrote: post #16
swinnipeg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Penguin opened the world to scalable negative SEO. This is now a common tactic in competitive markets. If you rank well it is worth worrying about.

I can't deny negative SEO is a worry and yes whilst Google opened up the doors for it they also recognised it and have started providing ways to hopefully protect yourself. (Disavowing links etc) If your in a competitive market where you have to worry about negative SEO so much so that it is making an impact on your SERPs then I'm sure the web spam team would be more than interested in hearing from you

The largest problem with Disavow is that it doesn't scale as quickly as negative SEO does. You can't possibly build a legit disavow list, contacting every website, documenting effort, not to mention that Google doesn't even show you all the links, when $5 at Fiverr can toss 20k forum links at a site.

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#49

Post by notatoad »

instakill wrote: post #42
wyck wrote: post #21

Im glad to see the clustering is being looked into, there is nothing worse than searching for something and seeing 15 links in a row from the same domain ( like tripadvisor or other large content heavy sites).

I agree, with one exception: StackOverflow.

At some point we could probably start searching stackexchange directly rather than relying on google to return stackexchange links. Their internal search is really quite good.

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#50

Post by nwh »

swinnipeg wrote: post #9

Hacked sites are a dominant strategy is many markets right now. Perp will Hack N sites, cloak them so only the googlebot sees the hacks, and use those links to drive rankings of a site in a highly liquid market place (Pharma, gambling, payday, insurance). When google can't devalue hacked/cloaked links well, I expect much collateral damage with Penguin (since it has primarily been focused on low value links). It won't…

Surely Google could crawl back with a "user" in a new IP range to detect and ban this sort of behaviour. I was under the impression that they did this to some degree anyway.
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