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Negative SEO Does Exist

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Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#31

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

andrenotgiant wrote: post #6

I think you need to break your argument into two parts. 1. People ARE creating spammy links that point to competitor sites in the hopes of damaging their search rankings. - You have proven this. 2. As a result of a competitor creating spammy links to your site, your rankings in Google have been permanently negatively effected. - I don't think the data you present is sufficient to prove this. Correlation does not equa…

> The data you present is sufficient to prove this. Correlation does not equal causation.

As long as google keep the ranking details secret (i.e. always, with good reason) then absolute proof is hard.

You're right that "Correlation does not equal causation" but it don't discount correlation entirely either. This evidence is enough to treat the claims that negative SEO does not happen with extreme scepticism. The burden of proof has moved.

Given that there are penalties for some links, what is the mechanism that makes negative SEO non-existent? And how do you prove that this mechanism is infallible.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#32

Post by programminggeek »

I think there are two issues at play.

1) Google massively discounted exact match domains, so if you were ranking well before because of an EMD, don't expect to now.

2) Negative SEO has always been a possibility, but a lot of sites aren't helping themselves either.

For like a decade now, there have been plenty of shady link networks where you could get millions of links. It would not be difficult to get millions of spam links with the same anchor text and make it look like Blue Widgets was spamming.

It's not important whether a link is spammy or not, it matters if it's helping you rank better, is being discounted, or if it's penalizing you.

It is possible that those links existed before the Google updates and were helping blue widgets.com rank better. Then Google discounted the spammy links and the EMD, and now the site isn't ranking.

It's also possible that Google is penalizing those links.

In the end, spam links don't come with a great big attribution of how they got there, who put them there, and what the intent is.

A link is a vote. Just like votes, you can stuff the ballot box or you can make it look like your competitor is stuffing the ballot box.

In the end nobody is entitled to rank well on Google search for any reason at all. They could order by rand() tomorrow and you're up a creek.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#33

Post by cpayne624 »

tomp wrote: post #28
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…

Agree 100%. No benefit, no penalty

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#34

Post by joshstrange »

jacquesm wrote: post #18
[deleted] wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

No, I got it. it's just that Google will need to admit the problem exists and will need to deal with it openly (ie, admit that none of their methods are perfect) and explain that any kind of classifier tends to have false positives. And the OP should bolster his case by naming names instead of hiding behind being afraid that he might become the target of exactly such an attack. I would say that would be easily resolv…

> And the OP should bolster his case by naming names instead of hiding behind being afraid that he might become the target of exactly such an attack. I would say that would be easily resolved if the proof was strong enough.

In a perfect world, yes, that would be the case but we don't live in a perfect world. I think the OP is perfectly within their rights to not paint a bullseye on their back with zero assurance that google will protect them.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#35

Post by boobsbr »

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…

> When I crawled geocities and re-hosted it under reocities.com

I'm really scared of finding my old homepage there. Dorkiness level off the charts...

Do you know if Fortunecity was ever re-hosted in a similar fashion? I had a Diablo 1 clan page there somewhere.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#36

Post by jacquesm »

joshstrange wrote: post #34
jacquesm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I got it. it's just that Google will need to admit the problem exists and will need to deal with it openly (ie, admit that none of their methods are perfect) and explain that any kind of classifier tends to have false positives. And the OP should bolster his case by naming names instead of hiding behind being afraid that he might become the target of exactly such an attack. I would say that would be easily resolv…

> And the OP should bolster his case by naming names instead of hiding behind being afraid that he might become the target of exactly such an attack. I would say that would be easily resolved if the proof was strong enough. In a perfect world, yes, that would be the case but we don't live in a perfect world. I think the OP is perfectly within their rights to not paint a bullseye on their back with zero assurance that…

It's a pretty bold claim, some hard evidence would bolster that claim considerably. As it is this is one step above hearsay but the whole thing amounts to a possibly fictional conversation with another SEO type and a pretty graph. Without real information Google could not disprove the claims made here and they carry zero weight with me until substantiated. And I'm not exactly google's best friend.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#37

Post by freebs »

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…

Please don't forget that many companies may go through multiple SEO/marketing agencies before they find a team that knows what they are doing. Just because someone is cleaning it up doesn't mean they made the mess.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#38

Post by johnward »

johnward wrote: post #30
viraptor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Although they could certainly have something in their algorithm that says: "This site as always been very good and now all the sudden it's getting a bunch of spam links. Ignore those links." It's not like you are going to use negative SEO to bring down a wikipedia but I could see it happen against sites that would be a Pagerank =< 6.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#39

Post by tboyd47 »

Lobbying Google to reverse course now is surely a lost cause. Google has a vested interest in improving the user experience of Google. Not the profitability of every other site that has a symbiotic relationship with Google by optimizing against their ranking system. So even if you do have a quality site, and they did open a door to allow your competitors to blast you with bunk backlinks, all this is completely hidden from Google's user base and so they ultimately don't care.

Maybe what website owners should do here, if they have lost considerable money, is file a class-action suit against Google. I'd actually be surprised if no one is doing this.

This is a really interesting subject, anyway. Thanks for the post. I would love to hear a follow-up about how people with web properties can guard against negative SEO. Maybe by keeping your site registered under multiple domains at a time? Or moving your content around on the same domain with permanent redirects? I dunno, it really seems like this is changing the whole industry.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#40

Post by matnewton85 »

andrenotgiant wrote: post #6

I think you need to break your argument into two parts. 1. People ARE creating spammy links that point to competitor sites in the hopes of damaging their search rankings. - You have proven this. 2. As a result of a competitor creating spammy links to your site, your rankings in Google have been permanently negatively effected. - I don't think the data you present is sufficient to prove this. Correlation does not equa…

Why are you even arguing with this? Do you have any experience with SEO?

I use negative SEO regularly to drop sites out of the top 10 in Google. I only target low quality sites that shouldn't be in there anyway, but Google in all their algorithmic wisdom has ranked them, so... I knock them out.

Low quality 5 page Adsense sites shouldn't outrank actual, legitimate businesses so it's just a case of click click, BOOM. I never target the actual competitors of my clients.

Negative SEO is part of the toolkit of any competent SEO professional nowadays. It just has to be.

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