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Negative SEO Does Exist

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Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#51

Post by gk1 »

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…

To those reading the above post and wondering if this is acceptable behavior for SEO's: It isn't. It's called black-hat SEO, and it's full of people like this who pull dirty tricks without any shame. They even justify it to themselves--they're doing it because somebody's gotta do it, and everybody does it anyway!

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#52

Post by jacquesm »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #45
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 somet…

I call them as I see them. If you want to characterize reocities.com as a copyright infringement case then I invite you to sue.

I take it you have a similar attitude towards archive.org?

SEO's act the same way arms dealers act during an armed conflict. They will happily sell their weapons to all sides while they profit without creating any value for anybody. I don't care one bit about how much traffic google sends me on either ww.com, reocities.com or any of the other web properties that I maintain, I've yet to 'SEO optimize' anything and I feel that SEO's are as an industry just one notch above mass spammers. In some cases worse than spammers (because they actively destroy good websites).

I tend to be rather black-and-white about this because as a webmaster I have to fight these jerks on a regular basis and it tends to show in how I write about them. Consider me pissed off. I feel like I'm in the middle of a shoot-out between Google on the one side, and a bunch of over-active greedy script kiddies and their customers on the other.

If you feel SEO can do good show me an example where an SEO achieved value creation rather than shifting around a percentage in some zero sum game. The only value SEO's create is for themselves.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#53

Post by jellicle »

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…

Why would you say it would be "easily resolved"? Does Google have a history of "fixing" bad search rankings upon being presented with evidence? I mean any history at all, much less "easily resolving" it?

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#54

Post by jacquesm »

freebs wrote: post #37
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.

Doing due diligence on the parties that you enter into business with is an obligation on the part of the purchaser. Anybody that does something shady which you claim was done outside of your control should be accompanied by a breach of contract lawsuit or something to that effect. And if it isn't then that implies tacit agreement or turning a blind eye to the tactics deployed as long as there are results. Reputable companies keep a tight leash on what subcontractors do in their name.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#55

Post by gk1 »

cm2012 wrote: post #49
jacquesm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You make a great point, but there's already a way to plant that "red flag": You can report websites for bad behavior to Google.[0]

It's a different thing entirely to take matters into your own hands and plant dynamite under the "bad signs."

[0] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#56

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#57

Post by SteveGerencser »

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 find it interesting that you have chosen to take one comment from one person, question his ability to represent an entire professional community, yet in the very next breath use that same person to define an entire group as morally bankrupt.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#58

Post by jacquesm »

cm2012 wrote: post #49
jacquesm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I like your thought experiment. Check out elsewhere in this thread how it works in real life. Thought experiments are great when they can teach you a new insight about how something actually works (for instance, Einstein and the elevator), but when they describe an alternate reality then they are less useful.

If you have a problem with signs near an intersection you petition the city council without touching the signs by your false-advertising competitors, but in the real world no flags are placed, but websites are forcibly removed from the index or pushed down so far that it does not matter. By analogy, you don't flag the bad signs, you go and burn down the signs by the competition leaving just your own.

This is one reason that during election times (when the tempers can run quite high) removing a sign of a political party can come with surprisingly high penalties.

BTW, if any company engages in false advertising there are other ways to resolve that.

> I don't have any skin in the game,

and

> I don't do negative SEO or anything not 100% white hat in the little SEO work I do.

Are inconsistent.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#59

Post by jacquesm »

jellicle wrote: post #53
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…

Why would you say it would be "easily resolved"? Does Google have a history of "fixing" bad search rankings upon being presented with evidence? I mean any history at all, much less "easily resolving" it?

I recall the rapgenius.com case as being dealt with in a matter of days.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#60

Post by jacquesm »

SteveGerencser wrote: post #57
jacquesm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 find it interesting that you have chosen to take one comment from one person, question his ability to represent an entire professional community, yet in the very next breath use that same person to define an entire group as morally bankrupt.

Oh, I don't question his ability to represent the community at all. Maybe I should re-write that sentence to remove any ambiguity? I think he's a fine specimen, quite representative judging by the offers I get from him and his colleagues.
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