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

61–70 of 172 posts

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#61

Post by ryandrake »

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…

Assuming you are not purchasing ads, I'd argue that relying heavily on a company you have no formal commercial relationship with to bring you customers might not be a great idea.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#62

Post by rubinelli »

dbla wrote: post #28

Why does google need to penalize sites for spammy inbound links? Couldn't they instead just make those links not contribute at all (not penalize the ranking but not boost it at all either)? I'm sure it's more complicated than this, but I'm curious.

Simply ignoring spammy links doesn't reduce link spam, because people still have an incentive to keep spamming in the off chance that some of those links will be considered valid.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#63

Post by sharkweek »

ScottWhigham wrote: post #37

Somewhat of a sidebar, but what's to prevent the following: 1) You buy 1000 links for $5 [1] 2) You enjoy a brief rise in the rankings 3) Google catches on and penalizes you 4) You use the link disavow tool to effectively say, "We didn't do it! A competitor did it to us!" [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5813496

We're seeing a lot of this tactic in a lot of the more... difficult industries right now with super high value terms (payday loans, viagra, etc). What is hot and popular is doing exactly 1-3 except on a hyper-rotation of domains.

Build up a bunch of shitty websites, get them ranking for a few weeks, they inevitably get penalized, then just switch domains and rinse and repeat.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#64

Post by austenallred »

apalmer wrote: post #60
austenallred wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

I'm speaking from a user level. If I'm a user and Google isn't showing me the best results, it's not doing its job for its users. If Google doesn't have users, its ad space isn't worth anything, and its business model ceases to exist.

Google is the epitome of a consumer web business model. They sell users. So yes, they have to have buyers, but their most important job is to have users to sell.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#65

Post by coderdude »

tlrobinson wrote: post #43
ckluis wrote: post #3

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

FYI, he does (or did, no comments in a few years): https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=MattCutts

It's this https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Matt_Cutts

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#66

Post by bradleyjg »

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…

I don't understand why the quality of the blog should have anything to do with the search results that link to the ecommerce site. Just because your site should show up in the ranking for "reset color scheme Samsung monitor" doesn't mean it should show up in the ranking for "buy samsung monitor".

To the extent google is conflating the positive signals for the first with the second, that's a bug in their algorithm that should be fixed over time. When it is I certainly won't cry any tears for the people that exploited the bug all this time.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#67

Post by davedx »

ScottWhigham wrote: post #37

Somewhat of a sidebar, but what's to prevent the following: 1) You buy 1000 links for $5 [1] 2) You enjoy a brief rise in the rankings 3) Google catches on and penalizes you 4) You use the link disavow tool to effectively say, "We didn't do it! A competitor did it to us!" [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5813496

Why would you enjoy a brief rise in the rankings from something that causes 'negative SEO'? Surely these inbound links either harm or help you, not both?

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#68

Post by tlrobinson »

coderdude wrote: post #65
tlrobinson wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, he does (or did, no comments in a few years): https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=MattCutts

It's this https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Matt_Cutts

Ah ha, I thought I had seen him around more recently.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#69

Post by jonknee »

Negative SEO and negative click fraud (a competitor clicking on my AdSense ads fraudulently) are the two biggest things that keep me up at night. It's terrifying knowing that something so simple can take me out overnight and there's nothing I can do to prevent it.

I'm surprised this hasn't become more like DDOS where thugs blackmail webmasters into submission with the threat of taking them offline. Or maybe it has and I just haven't heard...

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#70

Post by ronaldx »

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 is Google's job to make sure every webmaster has a fair shot - any unfairness ensures the top results will go to organisations who are best at gaming the system: unfairness harms the results.

Google won search by being good at this when other search engines were not.

Post reply on HN