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Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

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Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#121

Post by mattezell »

jacquesm wrote: post #115
mattezell wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, I got you... So you were stating your personal opinion on back-links, rather than stating a factual observation about organic back-links being similar to unicorns...

You're stance definitely makes more sense as an opinion - unlike factual statements, opinions afford space for both fact and fallacy (i.e. "it is either organic or you're building links.")...

When stating things in a matter of fact manner ("...There is no such thing as organic link building..."), it tends to lead people to believe that you are debating the legitimacy of some point they've made...

Thanks for clearing up the confusion...

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#123

Post by Matt_Cutts »

Note: this article is over a year old. The article makes it sound as if this is some new pronouncement, but it's really not. I've been using the language mentioned in this article since 2010, at least: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/calling-for-link-spam-reports/... where I said "we’ve said in the past that we work very hard to prevent competitor A from hurting competitor B."

The change on the official guidelines comes from a tech writer noticing that I normally say "we work hard to prevent this" and asking back in February 2012 if we should update the language on that page. I said yes and the language changed in March 2012. It looks like this article is from April 2012.

One of the big reasons we say softer things (rather than "it's impossible") regarding the idea of negative SEO is that we have seen people to pretty crazy things to steal/hijack domain names in the past, like the bizarre history of sex.com: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex.com

People talk about negative SEO far more than people actually attempt it, because you're never quite sure what effect (say) pointing some links to a site might have--it might help the site instead of hurting it--plus it's typically a better use of your time to develop your own site.

But if there's a site that is worried about negative SEO, the site can disavow any links they want using our the disavow tool in Google's Webmaster Tools. You can even sort to see the most recent links if you're worried that this is something that just started.

The primary usage of the disavow tool is so that a site can disavow bad linking that the site did itself and can't get removed from the web, but the disavow tool also works fine to disavow links that you're worried might be spammy.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#124

Post by underdown »

brown9-2 wrote: post #95
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…

* The scary reality is that right now that entire operation could be destroyed by a competitor in a couple minutes if they knew how... but the idea that the livelihoods of a dozen people could vanish if someone got a little bit ambitious deserves a better response* Isn't this always the state of running a business, though? A new competitor can always come along out of the blue and undermine your complete offering or…

A company that has a better business model, better customer service, or better goods/services is not the issue here. The issue is a competitor can tank your rankings by dropping $100 on crappy links. The disavow process is a good step forward but negative seo can still destroy several months worth of revenue while waiting for Google to sort it out.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#125

Post by dbarlett »

arbuge wrote: post #109
magicalist wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, go read the comments. The first change was made 10 years ago; the change you're referring to apparently happened sometime between March and April 2012[1]. Moreover, there's absolutely no information about how you could penalize someone's site. The article's speculation is exactly that. Honestly, if it were as easy as buying a bunch of spam links to a site for $20 and get them penalized or delisted, there would ha…

Somebody posted a link to a detailed expose' on HN a few weeks ago detailing a successful negative SEO campaign to destroy a competing car dealer's rankings. I'll see if I can dig it up, but this kind of stuff is definitely going on - and people are specifically being paid to do it.

I think it was http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-... (Comment by trevin https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5701104)

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#126

Post by nhebb »

arbuge wrote: post #105
nhebb wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google gives instruction on how to do it in bulk [0]. You can: - Download your links from webmaster tools. - Edit the file so it contains just the undesirable links. - Use the disavow tool [1] to upload the file. (If your livelihood depends a lot on organic traffic, that is one scary red button. The wording on the page coupled with the button text makes it sound like you will disavow all the links to your website.) […

Not really a "bulk" solution at all... "- Edit the file so it contains just the undesirable links." That's the part where intensive manual labor comes in, weeding through those links one by one.

Oh, I know. I guess we're supposed to be thankful for being able to submit a single file, though.

I also noticed that the help page states "(the file type must be .txt and it must be encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII)". How many non-technical people even know what that means?

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#127

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#128

Post by arbuge »

dbarlett wrote: post #125
arbuge wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody posted a link to a detailed expose' on HN a few weeks ago detailing a successful negative SEO campaign to destroy a competing car dealer's rankings. I'll see if I can dig it up, but this kind of stuff is definitely going on - and people are specifically being paid to do it.

I think it was http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-... (Comment by trevin https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5701104 )

Yes, that's it. Thanks.

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#129

Post by cousin_it »

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…

Do you think the world would be worse off if Google were fair to webmasters? Do you think perfect competition should trump all other values?

Re: Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google

#130

Post by grey-area »

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…

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.

I think this gets to the heart of the conflict of interest which Google experiences and those who depend on them are afraid of. On the one hand, they have a reputation for valuable and high-quality search results which are not vulnerable to gaming. On the other hand, they have an established monopoly on search, which will not disappear overnight, and a business selling ads which compete against their own search results for clicks. Their interests do not currently align with those who appear in their organic search results, except tangentially and in the long-term (as a way of keeping eyeballs on those results because everyone views them as trustworthy).

So there is a tension there as good search results mean less ad clicks short-term, and less ad clicks means less money for Google. In an ideal world for Google as a corporation, their first page would simply be search results, tailored to a user's request, with no organic search results whatsoever, and indeed, their space on the results page does have a growing advertising component (paid ads, G+, ads for google places or other services like shopping). Obviously at present Google has managed to walk that tightrope and provide great search results, downgrade spammy results and ignore bad links, while making money from advertising displayed with those results, but it's a delicate balance, and there are commercial pressures to improve advertising clicks, but no short-term commercial pressures to improve search result clicks.

If those results can be poisoned or gamed easily, it doesn't really affect Google in the short term, only in the long term, and only if users start to notice and desert their service (over a period of years probably) - that's not necessarily the case if users don't have many comparison points because of Google's scale and dominance. It might even be good for Google in the short term, as businesses start to buy more adwords visits when their organic results decline. I'm not trying to suggest there is some conspiracy at Google, just pointing out the intrinsic tension at the heart of their business between good results and good ad revenue.

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