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Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

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Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#51

Post by mattezell »

sharkweek wrote: post #35
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…

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. Or anyone who runs an online business...? Let's say you're a small ecommerce site, your site is growing, your blog is gaining readership as it's become a great resource. One of your nasty competitors who doesn't like that your rankings are going up for all this…

"...hop on Fiverr and buy tons of terrible links all pointing at your site and your rankings all the sudden drastically drop because your site is now viewed as spam..."

I saw this very thing happen in real life, actually... though it wasn't a competitor...

A well meaning team member on a project which I was previously affiliated with decided "Hey, I know how we can get this project some exposure! FIVERR!"...

Yes, I know that there are better, less shady, approaches to generating traction, but we will just blame inexperience and a temporary lapse in judgement for the expensive lesson in negative SEO...

Long story short, weeks of organic link building and organic service/site promotion were completely obliterated within 72hrs of $20 worth of Fiverr backlink purchases...

Needless to say, so far as I know, the team only uses 100% whitehat approaches for site and product promotions now...

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#52

Post by skyraider »

trevin wrote: post #40
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.

Google's WT index seems to provide a fair amount of the links. There are a few 3rd party tools that do a really good job of indexing nearly all of the backlinks to your site: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org http://www.ahrefs.com http://www.majesticseo.com

Thanks, opensiteexplorer displays about 75x more links that GWT does. Great stuff.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#53

Post by tomjen3 »

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…

You are partly right, but you seem to think it is googles job to serve you, it is not. It is googles job to make money when you click on ads, so their job is to make you click on ads.

And while you are right that some false positives may be acceptable there is a hell of a difference between accidental false positives and false positives created because of competitors actions.

You don't want to live in a world where the scummiest bastard gets to put his links ahead of they guy who is actually providing a service. We already have that situation if you google for the names of certain appliances (eg. my dishwasher) where all the results are to meta-shopping sites.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#54

Post by Finster »

magicalist wrote: post #32
damoncali wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government may some day think otherwise. Google's monopoly on search is substantial enough that they risk much by eschewing fairness in favor of quality. I would tread very lightly if I were in Google's shoes.

Good luck defining "fairness". That regulation is going to go really well.

The Federal Government never let a little thing like undefinability stop them before.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#55

Post by austenallred »

shawnz wrote: post #48
austenallred wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

Their job is to show the best results for a given search query. If my website is the best but it doesn't appear at the top because a competitor has attacked it, Google isn't doing its job.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#56

Post by alan_cx »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #46

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.

A confirmation of fact is less relevant than peoples assumptions?

What you seem to be suggesting is that information that people cannot be 100% sure of is perfectly valid, and reasonable to base decisions on. But, when that information is confirmed to be true, that has not enough value to report.

I simply do not understand or accept that way of thinking.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#57

Post by tomjen3 »

larrys wrote: post #17
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…

Well the cure is pretty simple. You can apply pagerank in to calculate the reputation of each site and then multiply that number with the value of the outgoing link, using normal page rank.

How do you get the reputation information? Well you need a network of creators, people, so that you can capture the social interactions between them.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#58

Post by sharkweek »

mattezell wrote: post #51
sharkweek wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Or anyone who runs an online business...? Let's say you're a small ecommerce site, your site is growing, your blog is gaining readership as it's become a great resource. One of your nasty competitors who doesn't like that your rankings are going up for all this…

"...hop on Fiverr and buy tons of terrible links all pointing at your site and your rankings all the sudden drastically drop because your site is now viewed as spam..." I saw this very thing happen in real life, actually... though it wasn't a competitor... A well meaning team member on a project which I was previously affiliated with decided "Hey, I know how we can get this project some exposure! FIVERR!"... Yes, I k…

I know plenty of people who know just enough to be dangerous like that -- they know that links are the one of the main factors in rankings and then get tunnel vision in increasing linking domains.

"Boy that 1000 links for $5 sure seems a lot more efficient than the slow, organic process of building up a resourceful, industry-relevant blog!"

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#60

Post by apalmer »

austenallred wrote: post #55
shawnz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fr…

Their job is to show the best results for a given search query. If my website is the best but it doesn't appear at the top because a competitor has attacked it, Google isn't doing its job.

I completely get you from a human level.

From a business level google's job is to sell ads, it sell ads by providing valuable search results 'for free', and one part of the intrinsic quality of the search results is that they are 'good' in the sense that you describe.

Aside from that google really doesnt owe anyone anything, if tomorrow google found that showing small businesses search results negatively affected their bottom line, your mom and pop ecommerce site and all like it would disappear (until searchers moved on to another service). Google's 'fairness' only exists and should be counted on as long as game theortic/min max optimization of bottom line happens to align googles interests with your own...

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