Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

searchenginewatch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 172 posts

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#41

Post by lukeschlather »

nivla wrote: post #33
shawnz wrote: post #15

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 t…

>It's not Google's job to make sure every webmaster has a "fair shot" at rankings. It is as much as it is the job of Microsoft to allow you to install 3rd party browser or OS on a desktop. When you have a monopoly in an industry, you don't get to choose favorites else it will considered an abuse of power.

Google's product is choosing favorites. You tell Google not to choose favorites, they just return a random list of webpages.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#42

Post by trevin »

The most frustrating part of negative SEO or any link cleanup is that Google doesn't tell which links they think are spammy links. If you are working for/with a site that has been online for a while, they will have thousands of crappy looking links pointing to their site.

Scraper sites pick up content from other websites all the time and cross post with porn and other crap. Directory submissions that were perfectly fine 5 or 10 years ago can now be viewed as "low quality" by Google. Blogs that used to be well-maintained have been bought by spammers and SEOs and are now content farms.

Google's lack of transparency when it comes to links is very troublesome. I understand they can't give out the ins and outs of their algo, but asking your average website owner to go through 10k+ backlinks and identify and remove the links is a pretty tall task when there isn't a clear standard on what is bad and what isn't.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#44

Post by carl689 »

The article has some user comments I found relevant I don't see pointed out here.

"That change was actually made a year ago. The only change on that page is the positioning of the video. The actual text has not changed in over a year."-Barry Schwartz

AND

"The article is also incredibly wrong about the previous change. Google did't add the "almost" last year (2012) but TEN years ago, in 2003, as you can see with Archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20030915000000*/http://www.google... -LowLevel

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#45

Post by austenallred »

shawnz wrote: post #15

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 t…

Nonsense; that is Google's one and only job.

My parents run a small e-commerce business that has supported them for years; a team of a dozen people run everything from the little website to the shipping. All of their sales come from (mostly accidental) SEO and Amazon.

The scary reality is that right now that entire operation could be destroyed by a competitor in a couple minutes if they knew how. It's not hard to find a package on Fiverr that includes 1,000 spammy links for $5, so a competitor could easily direct 5,000 spammy links (more than the entire amount of links directed at them right now) for $50.

Is that use case emotionally loaded? Sure. But it isn't extreme. I recognize that the company only exists because Google gave it a chance to, but the idea that the livelihoods of a dozen people could vanish if someone got a little bit ambitious deserves a better response than what Google has given it.

Google's current options for removing negative SEO are very hand-wavy, mostly because they don't really believe negative SEO is a large issue. Admittedly, potential for negative SEO is a cop-out black-hatters use to cover their tracks more than it is a real threat, but that doesn't mean Google can ignore it.

Google's current solutions for combating negative SEO: "Ask webmasters to remove the links" - a complete joke and everyone knows it, and the Link Disavow Tool, which is pretty difficult to use, and Google admits that it may be several months before the rankings are updated after links are disavowed.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#46

Post by DanielBMarkham »

The amazing thing is that this is news.

Of course competitors can trash your organic rankings -- and it's a lot easier for them to trash you than it is to promote themselves.

I'm glad Google is slowly coming around to admitting that this house of mirrors has some flaws. The more information publishers get about this, the better choices we can make in content selection.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#48

Post by shawnz »

austenallred wrote: post #45
shawnz wrote: post #15

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 t…

Nonsense; that is Google's one and only job. My parents run a small e-commerce business that has supported them for years; a team of a dozen people run everything from the little website to the shipping. All of their sales come from (mostly accidental) SEO and Amazon. The scary reality is that right now that entire operation could be destroyed by a competitor in a couple minutes if they knew how. It's not hard to fin…

> Nonsense; that is Google's one and only job.

Why? You're not paying them to list your website. Meanwhile I am paying them, in ad impressions, to look at your listing. If you want reliable returns, buy an ad instead.

EDIT: What I am trying to say is, it doesn't matter to me if I see "Jack's Pastries" or "Jill's Pastries" in my search results. Your livelihood is not Google's responsibility, unless you buy ad space from them.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#49

Post by hippich »

I believe true way of dealing with spam links for Google would be ignore these. It will solve several problems at once: prevent spammed websites getting into index, prevent legitimate websites getting banned because of negative seo, make "seo specialist" job become a joke, and people eventually give up paying for it.

Google on the other hand tries to punish, i.e. to scare away potential gamers, instead of ignoring these. I believe this is wrong and inefficient approach.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#50

Post by andybak »

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…

Pagerank has been far from the sole ranking criteria for a long time

> Something other than ranking by inbound links seems to be needed at this point.

There's mounting evidence that this is the direction Google is going in.

Post reply on HN