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Negative SEO Does Exist

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Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#71

Post by jacquesm »

tlogan wrote: post #67
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?

> People working for Google +1

That would be a first.

I don't usually find myself 'on the side of google' in any argument and I highly doubt that so many googlers would be unable to think for themselves but would blindly upvote anything supportive of their employer.

By the same token, I don't think 'everybody else' includes all the people working in SEO.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#72

Post by rwhitman »

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…

Scolding pro blackhat SEO guys is an effort in futility. And the fact he confirmed using the technique also means that its no longer as effective

I'm sure most of his customers have no idea what he's doing either. With these guys its don't ask don't tell relationship. "I'll get your rank up for XYZ keywords for $70k a month but don't ask any questions on how". They do 15 minutes of work a day maintaining some link wheels, maybe some shady stuff like knocking sites out of the rankings, and collect twice the average american salary each month from the client. With that kind of income to work ratio moral obligations are easy to ignore

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#73

Post by resu_nimda »

Isofarro wrote: post #61
johnward wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ov…

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.

People do have emotions and act on them from time to time. I don't think it requires any assumptions about Cutts's ambitions, but rather about how much effort it would take an annoyed spammer/black-hat to point some of their tools at the highly visible source of their frustrations.

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.

You have a highly optimistic take on this. I think history generally shows that staying one step ahead of criminals/spammers/up-to-no-gooders is a never-ending struggle that does not tend towards positive resolution.

What "other ranking factors?" If you knew what those were, or even knew for sure they existed, the SEOs would too and they would be exploiting them. It's an entire industry whose sole purpose is to understand and game Google's rankings, and just as all this fuss about negative SEO shows, they're not losing.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#74

Post by wlesieutre »

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…

As mentioned in the article, that works if you can identify every spammy link. Without a penalty, you can make a million spammy links, let the filter catch 95% of them, and reap the benefits from the ones that get past.

That system isn't exploitable to sabotage another site's rank, but it also doesn't work at preventing link farms (as evidenced by most Google results before the recent change).

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#75

Post by normloman »

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."

Yes, because sabotaging your competitors with shady spamdexing practices fits most people's definition of "professional."

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#76

Post by rlpb »

Ryan_Jones wrote: post #66
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.

> How do you determine what's a good link or a bad link?

By intent. Intent is something that law has always considered. No need for an exception here.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#77

Post by qeorge »

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…

The problem is that in this case, "putting a red flag on [a website]" means creating 10s or 100s of thousands of spam blog comments on random websites.

Abusing your metaphor further: it would be more like spray painting the phone number of the shady business on every house in town. Certainly the officials would have to notice them then, thanks to your good works! Too bad for the home owners though...

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#79

Post by gscott »

I have tested negative seo to force a couple of websites out of listing positions that I had once and it works fine. What you do is buy multiple 50k "xrumer" postings with "pingbacks" for that website you want gone. Add in some spammy Fiverr jobs plus buy some links for that website you want gone on Text-Link-Ads then report that website as having paid links. This method works 100% of the time. This creates such a firestorm of links a webmaster would have to spend a month trying to disavow them and a lot of times webmasters don't even know what disavow means. Google is so worried about spamming and punishing websites rather then just ignoring the bad data. Since Google is out to punish and Google... it's a computer program it can't tell one thing from another other then these junk links exist therefor the hammer must be brought down on the webmaster who has no idea of what is going on. This was a year or more ago but I promise that this would work fine today. The smaller the website the better it works. Try it against a mega website and this would be ineffective because of the ratio of good links that they have.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#80

Post by lilsunnybee »

jacquesm wrote: post #54
freebs wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Keep in mind that a lot of small businesses are on the internet too, whose owners often don't understand how all this stuff works, and have just hired an SEO consultant or two in the past to help improve their Google search ranking, with no ill intentions other than trying to get more visibility and improve business. My parents are two of these people actually, and changing the rules all of a sudden like Google did, with no warning and a lot of secrecy about what ranking methods were now being used, hurt a lot of small businesses in the process; you don't have to look very hard on many forums to see how badly some people were affected.

And even trying to recover from the change, it's also very difficult. Even after disavowing any outside links, former SEO experts seem pretty clueless about how to improve visibility or even show up on the first few pages for Google now. Short of advice like "rewrite all of your product descriptions so that they don't match anything you have on ebay, so that you're not flagged as duplicating content", there's little help to be found.

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