Negative SEO Does Exist • Hacker News Board

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#21

Post by viraptor » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 1:17 PM UTC

searchmartin wrote: post #11

viraptor wrote: post #4

I've heard this so many times already and wonder... if it affects so many people who earn primarily via SEO consultancy, why wasn't the effect ever demonstrated on www.mattcutts.com / search "matt cutts"? Seems like the most visible way to make a point that can't be denied. PS. This is a real question, not a "you should do it" post. I assume someone would already give it a go by now.

search google for mattcutts.com - you'll see another post of mine from last year, detailing some theory ;)

Yes, I've seen you writing about it, but it was not done in the end. (at least not the link spamming that's mentioned in this article) Even worse, the article mentions "Any of those might work, but none are particularly reliable. Most actually stand a good chance of positively influencing their results instead." - which rather indicates that it's hard to do really negative SEO even if you try.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#22

Post by johnward » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 1:17 PM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #12

huhtenberg wrote: post #3

How can it not exist? You basically take competitors site and run a standard SEO link farm thing on it. Google picks it up and punishes the site, done. What am I missing? How can Google tell the real motive behind detected SEO activity?

Well the myth is that this will not punish the target site. It's not true which has been clear for a long time, but Matt insists it is.

Matt doesn't want to admit it but we all know it's true. The algorithm punishes shitty links and they can't tell if those shitty links were generated by me to increase my ranking or by a competitor trying to harm my ranking.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#23

Post by johnward » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 1:20 PM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #4

I've heard this so many times already and wonder... if it affects so many people who earn primarily via SEO consultancy, why wasn't the effect ever demonstrated on www.mattcutts.com / search "matt cutts"? Seems like the most visible way to make a point that can't be denied. PS. This is a real question, not a "you should do it" post. I assume someone would already give it a go by now.

Yes but Google has ways to manually override things. You don't think Cutts could get that done? It would be better to target some poor unsuspecting blogger but that would be pretty cruel.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#24

Post by SeanDav » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 1:20 PM UTC

I am no expert, but logically you could explain this behaviour of apparent negative SEO by Google discounting all links to "blue widgets" and the sites that market blue widgets that are now ranking higher, achieve this because of other links that are not being discounted by Google.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#25

Post by jgalt212 » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 1:20 PM UTC

Head of Google's Web Spam team is a position with too much power. For those dealing with Google, that's probably the second most powerful seat (after Larry/Sergey tie for first).

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. As such, no one person should occupy this seat for any significant tenure.

This comment is in no way a negative comment about Matt, just talking about the temptations one must face in such a powerful seat.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#26

Post by cosmie » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 1:23 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #15

cosmie wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the same time google should be extra careful that it does now allow good websites to be penalized by activities from even shadier SEO types that turn around and use these facilities against their competitors (rather than to avoid being penalized by it themselves). That was the point being made - people are being targeted by their competitors , using the negative penalty from link farms to devalue competitor's si…

Yes, I know that is the point being made. But that's a very small bit of fall-out from a huge improvement. OP is right in fact but this is a rarity, overall google search results improved and the fact that the whole SEO world is in panic about this (proof in my inbox) is fantastic news. That it can be used for bad purposes is obvious, those that were gaming before will game this just as much. But rather than being in…

Oh definitely! I like the fact that my top results aren't always dominated by eHow, Wikipedia, WikiAnswers, and Yahoo Answers now.

It's the denial about false positives that is frustrating. If you're going to build in logic to penalize link farming, then one would hope you'd make an attempt at identifying malicious link schemes. By categorically denying the possibility even exists, it leaves most people assuming such an attempt hasn't been made.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#27

Post by pistle » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 1:24 PM UTC

Seems the SEO community might need to build a new b2b around punishing the blackhat SEO folks that attack their clients. SEO can go fight amongst itself to the death.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#28

Post by tomp » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 1:24 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #2

I'm so happy google did this. For one tiny span of time the SEO world is given a taste of its own medicine. Let me explain: When I crawled geocities and re-hosted it under reocities.com I was trying to achieve something positive. I did not realize how infested geocities had become with spammers, linkfarms and other trash. Probably at least a few million of the accounts were either compromised or somehow tricked into…

This update doesn't change anything, really, it just reverses the effect; before, you were paying SEO black-hats to create links to your site, which should result in elevating your search rank, but now, you will be paying SEO black-hats to create links to competitors' sites, sinking them in the search results, and relatively elevating your search rank.

The only thing search engines can do to stop SEO spam is to avoid giving any weight to spammy links.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#29

Post by viraptor » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 1:29 PM UTC

johnward wrote: post #23

viraptor wrote: post #4

I've heard this so many times already and wonder... if it affects so many people who earn primarily via SEO consultancy, why wasn't the effect ever demonstrated on www.mattcutts.com / search "matt cutts"? Seems like the most visible way to make a point that can't be denied. PS. This is a real question, not a "you should do it" post. I assume someone would already give it a go by now.

Yes but Google has ways to manually override things. You don't think Cutts could get that done? It would be better to target some poor unsuspecting blogger but that would be pretty cruel.

Could Matt do that - sure. Would he do that straight away, faster than the results can be captured, or does he have constant monitoring of his page - I doubt it. Still - nobody even tried as far as I can tell.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#30

Post by johnward » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 1:31 PM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #29

johnward wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but Google has ways to manually override things. You don't think Cutts could get that done? It would be better to target some poor unsuspecting blogger but that would be pretty cruel.

Could Matt do that - sure. Would he do that straight away, faster than the results can be captured, or does he have constant monitoring of his page - I doubt it. Still - nobody even tried as far as I can tell.

I don't know. I'm sure tons of spammers already target Matt's site (they all hate him). Google probably already has some kind of special exception for him.