Negative SEO Does Exist • Hacker News Board

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#41

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 1:50 PM UTC

boobsbr wrote: post #35

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.

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

Hehe, let me know if you want it removed.

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

Web.archive.org may have it.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#42

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 1:54 PM UTC

matnewton85 wrote: post #40

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…

> Negative SEO is part of the toolkit of any competent SEO professional nowadays.

The fact that you feel you represent the SEO professional community and that it is part of the standard toolkit to me is proof positive that the whole SEO community is a morally bankrupt bunch. It's just shades of gray all the way to 'black', parasitic rather than symbiotic and a net negative.

How you guys sleep at night is a mystery to me.

Who are you to determine what a low quality website is?

We should be happy you exist so you can correct Google? And the fact that your paying customers rise accordingly is nothing but an unhappy coincidence?

> I never target the actual competitors of my clients.

A so you're the kind of SEO that as some kind of public service improves the google index for his own gratification. Sorry, I don't but that for a second.

Absolutely incredible this comment, but thank you for owning up to it.

Feel free to list your customers here so I can make sure to never ever do business with any of them.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#43

Post by searchmartin » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 1:56 PM UTC

huhtenberg wrote: post #13

searchmartin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

errrr- weird, works for me in the US - Ive just opened up the privacy restrictions on it though - try again? thanks for letting me know btw!

Yup, works now, thanks. What else can he possibly say though? He can't explain how they protect against it, because it would negate the protection, and he can't say that don't do anything, because that would just raise a shitstorm.

Yeah - agreed, Im not really against his position in as much that I realise he's stuck. If he did say "yeah, its possible, and it might screw your business up" then Google would have a massive PR problem.

I've done a fair bit of Cutts baiting in the past, but I do have absolute respect for the man, and the position he's in (we SEO's dont make it easy for him a lot of the time)

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#44

Post by logicallee » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 2:01 PM UTC

I think there's a very good argument to be made that negative SEO should be illegal, with punishment/compensation similar to that of slander and libel in the United States. (Which are incredibly specific, due to free speech issues.)

Why should slander and libel be illegal at all - why can't anyone say, claim, or publish anything they want whatsoever?

If you reflect on that the reason is fairly obvious.

Likewise, if negative SEO were illegal, it might have the same benefits.

Of course technically the standard would be much different from slander/libel, but the fundamental reason that we would limit free speech in this way is clear. It is just more damaging to the person being damaged than the limit on the free speech that it imposes costs us. (Which is taken seriously in the United States).

So, for this reason, there is a good argument to be made for specific, nuanced, laws against negative SEO in the form of civil penalties. I would support such a law.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#45

Post by pbhjpbhj » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 2:06 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…

>For one tiny span of time the SEO world is given a taste of its own medicine. //

I'm surprised at you for ascribing evil to an entire online industrial sector; I'd think you'd take a more circumspect approach.

Y'know, given that the next line is tantamount to 'I perpetrated a massive copyright infringement on hundreds of thousands of people's online content'; that you might feel that even tortuous actions can sometimes be justified.

People do bad things in most (all?) areas of human activity; SEOs can do good too IMO. It decreases the impact of any analysis to ignore that SEO is a valid activity - albeit, yes, sometimes done in malicious, invalid and/or immoral ways.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#46

Post by mattmaroon » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 2:06 PM UTC

I don't understand how negative SEO could not exist. Google is cracking down on people buying back links right? If I bought links for a competitor's website, wouldn't it stand to reason they'll be punished? Google has no idea who is doing the purchasing. (You could replace buying links with any action Google' algo punishes.)

As long as Google's algorithm has punitive measures in it from something that happens off of your site, it stands to reason a competitor could do those things on your behalf.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#47

Post by pbhjpbhj » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 2:08 PM UTC

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…

>avoid giving any weight to spammy links //

Which only requires perfect spam link analysis /s (or no ability to rank sites).

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#48

Post by underdown » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 2:10 PM UTC

programminggeek wrote: post #32

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 sp…

The exact match domain nerf was like two years ago.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#49

Post by cm2012 » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 2:11 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #42

matnewton85 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Negative SEO is part of the toolkit of any competent SEO professional nowadays. The fact that you feel you represent the SEO professional community and that it is part of the standard toolkit to me is proof positive that the whole SEO community is a morally bankrupt bunch. It's just shades of gray all the way to 'black', parasitic rather than symbiotic and a net negative. How you guys sleep at night is a mystery to…

I don't have any skin in the game, but what if we do a thought experiment?

You are a marketer who is running a big physical sign in real life near some intersection, selling widgets. There are always 10 other signs there. There is one very overworked official who checks the signs to make sure they aren't overtly bad for people looking at them.

You notice that two of the signs competing with your client blatantly say that they sell widgets, that their widgets cure cancer, and that other cancer treatments are shams. You know that this sign will mislead or annoy people at the very least, and also that the officials who decide what signs stay up would probably removed it if they look closer.

It just so happens that you know that the overworked official will look closer at signs if you put a red flag on them. Putting a red flag on a "good" sign will make the official look closer but not do anything about it. But if the official notices the "bad" signs in question, he will probably take them down.

You do it self servingly, of course, but if the signs weren't on the "bad" side in the first place, then the official wouldn't take it down. It's arguable that its not immoral to flag those signs - the flag just tells the overworked official algorithm to look closer and a little more stringently.

---

To be clear: I don't do negative SEO or anything not 100% white hat in the little SEO work I do. But applying negative SEO to an otherwise "good website" is like putting weight concrete on the base of an already huge pillar. It can really only hurt borderline sites, as defined by Google's rules.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#50

Post by adriand » Wed, Jun 18, 2014, 2:14 PM UTC

cosmie wrote: post #26

jacquesm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why can't Google just apply a different algorithm to link farms that have appeared recently? Presumably anything relatively recent is either someone who doesn't know about the changes to the algorithm that penalize link farms, or is engaging in negative SEO.