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Negative SEO Does Exist

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Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#91

Post by jacquesm »

3RqGFE22ZMuOXNU wrote: post #82
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…

I completely agree, someone needs to drop these low quality sites out of the top 10 in Google. Here is a typical example of a website that I think needs negative SEOing: http://www.matthewnewton.net/

That is very much un-called for, as much as the OP is distasteful to me your action is far worse.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#92

Post by Angostura »

huhtenberg wrote: post #3

How can it not exist? You basically take competitors site and run a standard SEO link farm thing on it. Google picks it up and punishes the site, done. What am I missing? How can Google tell the real motive behind detected SEO activity?

I think its the difference between assigning a spammy link 0 and a spammy link -1 when calculating rank. With the former, I can use a thousand spammy links, knowing that even if only 1% get through, I still benefit.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#93

Post by vectorpush »

jacquesm wrote: post #88
antjanus wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to look at it in another way. I've a small blog, one that I love running, it makes barely any money, but for a long time ranked for some pretty good keywords. Anyways, a few of my articles blew up on hackernews, reddit, even on twitter (with smashing magazine tweeting it out), as a result, everyone and their grandma linked back to my articles when they discussed the topic it targeted. What happened then? I l…

Why does it matter so much? That's a blog, and a non-commercial one at that. Why do you care so much what your 'link profile' is? If someone copies your content, go after them, sue them if you have to and out them. Make sure that they realize that if they copy your content that it will hurt. I have absolutely no idea what if any backlinks I have to my blog, nor could I care less about it. People will read it, or mayb…

Why does it matter so much? That's a blog, and a non-commercial one at that. Why do you care so much what your 'link profile' is?

Well, besides the fact that it's his prerogative to care about his blog's search ranking, I think the implications are pretty obvious; he's suggesting that if it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone, including someone who does have a commercial interest.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#94

Post by lmm »

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…

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

Who is Google to? Google is no more neutral or accountable than SEO folk, and is just as much a profit-oriented business as they are.

Google makes the rules and the rest of us play by them. And surprisingly enough, Google encourages the behaviour it rewards. If Google's policies are pro-evil I'd rather that evil be done by competent, organized professionals (who will be able to turn it off when Google changes its policies to something better, and who create a somewhat level playing field, even if it's everyone paying rent to an SEO expert) than haphazardly by a bunch of amateurs.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#95

Post by nekitamo »

viraptor wrote: post #4

I've heard this so many times already and wonder... if it affects so many people who earn primarily via SEO consultancy, why wasn't the effect ever demonstrated on www.mattcutts.com / search "matt cutts"? Seems like the most visible way to make a point that can't be denied. PS. This is a real question, not a "you should do it" post. I assume someone would already give it a go by now.

Negative SEO only consistently works on smaller sites with a small amount of backlinks (less than 1000). The idea behind negative SEO is to use tools to build a large amount of spammy links, such that 99% of the link profile of a site is obvious spam. This is easily achieved with tools like Xrumrer and Scrapebox. Find a site with 1000 backlinks, build a few hundred thousand spammy backlinks to it, and watch it drop.

To do the same for mattcutts.com you would have to build hundreds of millions spam backlinks to "outspam" his millions of legitimate backlinks. This is nontrivial.

So the people at the mercy of Negative SEO are the people least equipped to defend themselves: small hobby site owners, webmasters with personal blogs, small businesses etc. You can easily knock out their sites from the SERPs and they would never know what happened. Larger sites are secure due to the nature of their large link profiles.

Personally I think all the fear over Negative SEO has been overblown. I've personally been able to knock sites out of the SERPs for a year or so, and so have many other blackhatters. However, people would much rather spend their precious time and resources improving their own sites to get to the top of the SERPs rather than knocking out the competition.

I don't think Negative SEO is ok. But I also don't think it's a big deal.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#96

Post by [deleted] »

viraptor wrote: post #4

I've heard this so many times already and wonder... if it affects so many people who earn primarily via SEO consultancy, why wasn't the effect ever demonstrated on www.mattcutts.com / search "matt cutts"? Seems like the most visible way to make a point that can't be denied. PS. This is a real question, not a "you should do it" post. I assume someone would already give it a go by now.

[deleted]

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#97

Post by thefreeman »

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…

You are totally missing the entire point of this article. People are abusing these techniques to de-rank their competitors.

Perhaps in your specific example, these links are old enough that you can be sure that they were originally done for "seo" purposes. But in many situations that is not the case.

Also, you are completely ignoring the possible situation in which a website was bought by an "ethical" company and now they are trying to clean up the misdeeds of the past.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#98

Post by SquareWheel »

jacquesm wrote: post #52
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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.

Your generalizations are really quite misguided. SEOs achieve value when they optimize sites to fit Google's guidelines, which as it happens also benefits humans. Converting Flash sites to HTML, reorganizing the URL structure to convert ?articleid=5 to /my-great-article/, adding alt tags for screen readers, optimizing page speed, creating sitemaps, cleaning up 404s. Whitehat SEOs are often the caretakers of the web.

It's easy to focus on the bad guys who spam keywords and buy likes, but it's ignorant to assume that's all the industry consists of.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#99

Post by DontBeADick »

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…

I think your eagerness to pat yourself on the back has caused you to miss the main point of the article.

Congrats on your geocities thing, I guess?

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#100

Post by neurobro »

normloman wrote: post #75
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." Yes, because sabotaging your competitors with shady spamdexing practices fits most people's definition of "professional."

It's just a natural extension of the techniques that PR firms (or before the 1940s, propagandists) have been using for centuries.
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