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Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

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Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#11

Post by jacquesm »

leephillips wrote: post #2

Somehow it seems unfair for Google to suggest that people spend time with the disavowal tool to correct deficiencies in Google's algorithms.

Even more so if those links have previously been placed by people in their pay!

So:

company pays crap SEO to place spam links all over the globe to increase google rank

google increases page rank

crap SEO works a bit more together with 1000's of fellow crap SEOs

google increases page rank

google notices problem, starts penalizing sites with crap ranks

companies that previously employed crap SEO to spam now pay crap SEO to blackmail site owners previously used to place spam links on to remove links 'or else'.

Really, this is not a good development. The burden of dealing with spam is bad enough, now we need to deal with being blackmailed by SEO spammers to clean up after them as well or risk being penalized in google? wtf?

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#13

Post by pfortuny »

"It is impossible".

"It is quite difficult".

"We work hard to prevent it".

It is exactly the same as behaviour security companies had in the past until they learned that, to quote Adidas, 'impossible is nothing' and that 'quite difficult' is nonsense due to automation.

It used to be quite difficult to stage a DOS (anyone remembers the first one Yahoo! suffered in 2000?, ah, those were the days when we were surprised by them...). Nowadays a bunch of kiddies can put amazon down on its knees.

Well, probably not amazon.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#14

Post by ramayac »

arbuge wrote: post #5
leephillips wrote: post #2

Somehow it seems unfair for Google to suggest that people spend time with the disavowal tool to correct deficiencies in Google's algorithms.

Especially when a competitor could buy 1000s of these links for $20 on a place like fiverr. Are we supposed to spend the rest of our lives disavowing this stuff? Edit: the 1000s figure is not an exaggeration. Go to fiverr and search on "back link" to see.

Really?, wow... I had no idea about that. I bought some followers for a client once, but "1000's of links" for $20 sounds surreal (at least for me!)

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#15

Post by shawnz »

It's not Google's job to make sure every webmaster has a "fair shot" at rankings. It's their job to make sure the best results appear when I search for something. In Google's eyes, having false negatives is worth not having false positives, and that's just the reality of the web.

Besides, it seems to me that these "problems" are only really thought of as problems by the type of people who put "search engine" in the title of their blog.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#16

Post by SquareWheel »

skyraider wrote: post #12

Does anyone know if it's always the case that you can find spammy links to your site by using Google (e.g. link:mysite.com)? My link count in webmaster tools is an order of magnitude higher than the inbound links that I can find by using the search engine.

link: shows a limited subset, to prevent stealing competitor's links. Webmasters/Analytics should show everything though.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#17

Post by larrys »

arbuge wrote: post #6

The PageRank algorithm seems broken to me. If spam links count for negative value you get competitors doing negative seo by buying cheap bad links to competing websites in bulk via places like fiverr. If they count for zero value then you get webmasters trying their luck by buying the same stuff themselves - who knows, there could be a good link amongst all the bad stuff and no harm in trying... Something other than…

"The PageRank algorithm seems broken to me."

Imagine thinking that the "honor system" would actually not be gamed!

Pagerank was designed a long time ago and suffers from a way of thinking that academics such as Page and Brin have.

The same thing happened with email once the cat got out of the bag on that. Or on craigslist.org - Bottom line is not anticipating what would happen when widespread use of a product occurs and the user base changes significantly.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#18

Post by adorable »

skyraider wrote: post #12

Does anyone know if it's always the case that you can find spammy links to your site by using Google (e.g. link:mysite.com)? My link count in webmaster tools is an order of magnitude higher than the inbound links that I can find by using the search engine.

As far as I've seen, the links you'll find through the search engine are a limited set of links from "important" pages (i.e. not the spammy ones). To find your spammy backlinks you'd have to use webmaster tools.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#20

Post by larrys »

pinko wrote: post #7
ckluis wrote: post #3

Matt if you read hackernews. This is bullshit. Spam links should count for 0 value not negative value.

How about just asking, "Hey Matt, can you say something about why you decided spam links should count for negative value instead of 0?" I've never met him, but as demonstrated by his long HN profile, Matt is clearly a nice guy. He's also smart, so he probably thought this exact case through. None of us outside Google really know how this works. None of that means his group didn't make a poor decision in this case, bu…

"Matt is clearly a nice guy."

In a sense he plays the role of a politician. Not able to do much (he is only one google guy after all) and trying to keep the masses feeling that he is acting in their best interest. He can't really be blamed. The bottom line is that none of this has any impact on google anyway.

If anything it simply pushes more people to want to pay for paid placement.

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