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Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

searchenginewatch.com

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Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#111

Post by mattezell »

jacquesm wrote: post #107
mattezell wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...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…

> weeks of organic link building There is no such thing as organic link building . It is either organic or you're building links.

Orly? Thanks for the "correction"?

I guess that I, along with countless others (http://goo.gl/W1P69), have just been ignorantly using a fictional term that nicely summarizes the concept that we are trying to convey - i.e. "the building up of back-links via non-automated, traditional routes - such as those stemming from legitimate interations with other businesses and clients"...

Thanks, pal.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#112

Post by arbuge »

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's their job to make sure the best results appear when I search for something."

I would think it's pretty obvious they have to ensure every webmaster has a fair shot to guarantee the best results.

If a crappy website rises to the top by doing negative seo and denying the best results their fair shots, Google is not doing its job.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#115

Post by jacquesm »

mattezell wrote: post #111
jacquesm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> weeks of organic link building There is no such thing as organic link building . It is either organic or you're building links.

Orly? Thanks for the "correction"? I guess that I, along with countless others ( http://goo.gl/W1P69 ), have just been ignorantly using a fictional term that nicely summarizes the concept that we are trying to convey - i.e. "the building up of back-links via non-automated, traditional routes - such as those stemming from legitimate interations with other businesses and clients"... Thanks, pal.

I don't particularly care what you call it. Back-links that were placed at your behest are spam to me.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#117

Post by ekanes »

One way Google could mitigate this would be if webmasters could tell Google about new/expected links. Obviously some links are unexpected (great!) but if Google new you weren't trying to add 50 links, and 50 links showed up, perhaps they could take that into account.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#118

Post by dragonwriter »

Seems to me the general solution to negative SEO is instead of an unknown-quality-link bonus and a bad-link penalty, unknown-quality links should have no value and good links should have positive value.

The problem is it is probably harder to split the world into probably-good vs. unknown links rather than probably-bad vs. unknown links.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#119

Post by dragonwriter »

JangoSteve wrote: post #99
adventured wrote: post #97

The solution here is dead simple. Shitty links should have no SEO value, rather than a negative value. That eliminates the problem of people using bad links to hurt their competition.

But it also means there's nothing to lose and everything to gain by buying links for your own domain. Which would probably make the practice much more widespread.

> But it also means there's nothing to lose and everything to gain by buying links for your own domain.

Well, nothing to lose except money: to discourage this, you just have to have links-of-unknown-quality produce no benefit, and links-with-positive-quality provide positive value; this is better than links of unknown value providing positive value and links with negative quality providing negative value.

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