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Negative SEO Does Exist

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Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#61

Post by Isofarro »

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.

Spammers targeting mattcutts.com doesn't make sense. You are assuming Cutts plays the same SEO-game, and has the same "I have to be number one for my keywords" ambition, which isn't a given. All spammers do by targeting him is giving his spam team more data. mattcutts.com is just bait, no downside if it gets negative-SEO attacked, lots of upside.

The more negative SEO that happens, the more data that gives Google. Overtime, the negative SEO sources will be over-saturated, offering no benefit for either positive or negative SEO.

Driving down the positive and negative value of links makes all SEO link building efforts consequently worthless. Which in turns increases the importance of other ranking factors.

This is a natural evolution, in tiny tiny steps Google is nudging people into playing it's game - producing websites that have content. SEOers are slowly falling into line building private link networks, paying people to write content, afraid to spin/rehash existing content because it might leave a fingerprint Google can detect.

It's fascinating watching.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#62

Post by lifeisstillgood »

adriand wrote: post #50
cosmie wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's so obvious now you mention it :-) Any spammy link created now should simply be discarded, it either is an attack or it is a fool. Either way ignore

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#63

Post by jacquesm »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #62
adriand wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's so obvious now you mention it :-) Any spammy link created now should simply be discarded, it either is an attack or it is a fool. Either way ignore

Yes, exactly. With the cut-off date being the panda roll-out.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#64

Post by squeaky-clean »

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…

Seems like you're saying the benefits of the new spam detection outweigh the negatives. I disagree.

With the old system, a site could be scummy, and spammy, and get themselves to the top of Google by using questionable practices. This is still possible today (though only slightly more difficult than it was before), but it also gives a website the power to destroy a completely unrelated website's ranking.

In attempting to better control spam, Google has created a brand new weapon to use. One I feel has the potential to be even worse than spamming and link boosting.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#66

Post by Ryan_Jones »

logicallee wrote: post #44

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 n…

This takes us down a very slippery slope. Linking, is not illegal and I think we can all agree that the web would be ruined if simply adding a link to a site you own or control were made illegal.

So that raises the question: How do you determine what's a good link or a bad link? Pretty soon you'd have people arrested for linking to somebody's site from a news article or to/from sites like ripoffreport.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#67

Post by tlogan »

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…

  edit: the voting on this comment is interesting, 1->+9->+1->+9->+5
People working for Google +1

Others -1

Does that make sense?

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#68

Post by makomk »

johnward wrote: post #22
tluyben2 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or even whether the site they're punishing is the real target of the SEO at all. For example, there are a bunch of spammy "software index" sites that are basically just lists of free software applications trying to rank highly for people searching for that kind of software. It appears that Google has been penalizing the official websites of some of the software listed on those sites for being linked from lots of spammy sites.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#69

Post by rplnt »

logicallee wrote: post #44

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 n…

You can have that law in US.. and then what?

It might help in some cases, but people doing this probably aren't that stupid and would use foreign entity to do the dirty work if there was such law in effect.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#70

Post by Isofarro »

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…

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

That didn't work before. Zero weight for spammy links is gamed by spammers by spamming everything at full blast. There was no downside for them. There are better dials and switches than falling back to a known broken model.

With penalties in place spammers need to get those existing bad links removed for their own sites / or build from scratch new sites with clean link profiles (which they are doing anyway, slash and burn). Now they will need to multiply their efforts to negatively target sites above them (not just rank one site, but unrank several sites). Good luck doing that without leaving a detectable fingerprint/trace.

The history of when links are created - that will leave a clear beacon that a site has been targeted. Unless a spammer does it very slowly over the course of years. In which case, LOL.

Don't you think it would be noticeable that a site ranking well, with a clean back link profile suddenly starts attracting heaps and heaps of bad spammy links? That's a clear indication something is going on.

The better time to use negative SEO is when the spammer has already gotten ahead of his competitor. Then the influx of bad links might look like an effort to regain rankings. That would be more interesting.

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