Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Negative SEO Does Exist

webmarketingschool.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 228 posts

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#131

Post by Isofarro »

antjanus wrote: post #83
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'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…

"I never "link built" anything, the links just happened naturally"

Great. that's what's supposed to happen, links accumulate naturally. (I'm deliberately ignoring the inconsistencies in your story, BTW ;-)

"Yet, I get penalized for it. It's fucking shitty"

How are you being penalised? Did you get a warning of bad links in your Google Webmaster dashboard? If not, how do you know?

Links accumulate, and some disappear over time. That's natural on the web. If Google taking out a bunch of low quality sites affects your own site, that only means the value of your site is significantly positively affected by these sites, so your site was over-ranked. Now it's placed closer to where it should be.

Being linked to by big traffic sources also brings attention from less known sources - that's quite normal.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#132

Post by jacquesm »

rfergie wrote: post #123
jacquesm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that does not create value. It creates the impression of creating value, but in actual fact the same number of $ are spent online so the only thing that changes is where the money is spent. Value creation is a way to get out of the zero sum game.

If a business X is 5% better than business Y (for whatever reason) and marketing helps a customer go to business X rather than business Y then value is being created.

If you ask the business owners of X and Y which business is the better one then I'm sure that you'll get two different answers.

I don't think it is so hard to see that value creation is something that can't exist without creation. So when you take a set of low value inputs and you combine them (say, raw materials + energy + labour) and you then get something that you can sell for more than the inputs were worth then you have created value.

Marketing by itself does not create value (other than that it diverts some funds to the marketeer and possibly some funds from consumers to companies whose products are being marketed). Marketing creates turnover, not value.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#133

Post by jacquesm »

lilsunnybee wrote: post #119
jacquesm wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really sorry for your parents. That said, I think that being clueless about doing business on the internet and doing business on the internet is a combination that should not come with a guaranteed pay-out. If you then employ someone to act on your behalf (without understanding) then even though your intentions are good you could get hurt. In that sense I sympathize less with your parents than that I sympathize w…

Your assertion that SEO's are unequivocally a scummy bunch is wrong and seems pretty irrational to me. A lot of SEO is simply making sure you include good descriptions for items, include keywords, have a properly marked up site so that you are not unfairly penalized, when you have a legitimate reason to show up in results for certain search words. The fact that these SEO companies also did affiliate marketing (not sp…

> A lot of SEO is simply making sure you include good descriptions for items, include keywords, have a properly marked up site so that you are not unfairly penalized, when you have a legitimate reason to show up in results for certain search words.

For the most part we are in agreement here (except for the 'legitimate reason to show up in results for certain search words', if there are 100 companies in a certain field then only 10 of them will show up on page 1, regardless of any reasons to show up).

> The biggest problem is really that Google has a pretty effective monopoly on search, and can extort whatever prices they want for advertising, and can also make widespread secret changes that pretty much affect what sites are allowed to show up on the internet and which are not.

This we also are very strongly in agreement on. Monoculture is bad. Monopolies are bad. And no, bing, ddg and so on do not count.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#134

Post by J2B2 »

I worked at an SEO firm that had a range of client sites, including two of the three companies with the largest search engines. As with every update a large amount of speculation, with little data analysis, would pop up.

Content, Improper site setup, canonical tags, robot.txt changes, there are a significant number of issues that can impact rankings.

Unfortunately, instead of checking these owners of the site would always speculate that the impact was due to some new factor that certain SEO firms would perpetuate for marketing purposes.

If your to learn anything from these types of articles, its know your audience and create content for them.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#135

Post by DontBeADick »

jacquesm wrote: post #112
DontBeADick wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really trying to pretend that you don't care if people read your blog even though you link to it here all the time? If there were an olympic event for mental gymnastics, you'd be dominating right now.

> Are you really trying to pretend that you don't care if people read your blog even though you link to it here all the time? I checked to see if you have a point here, I submitted exactly one link out of the last 30 or so to my own site, the rest have been posted by others. If we go back 60 links that's approximately 300 days and there are still only 2 links, and both of these were in response to HN content, either…

Regardless of how many links you've posted (it's also in your profile), the point still stands: You want people to read your blog. The simple fact that you have a public blog on the internet demonstrates that, even if you never posted a link to it.

If you truly don't care about "what Google makes of it", why not block Google with your robots.txt file?

I'll tell you why: Because you do care, but you're pretending not to for the sake of arguing with a bunch of people on the internet. And the position you've taken in that argument appears to be based largely on spite rather than reason.

We get it, you don't like SEOs, but these changes clearly hurt innocent people who know little or nothing about SEO.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#136

Post by Isofarro »

rfergie wrote: post #123
jacquesm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that does not create value. It creates the impression of creating value, but in actual fact the same number of $ are spent online so the only thing that changes is where the money is spent. Value creation is a way to get out of the zero sum game.

If a business X is 5% better than business Y (for whatever reason) and marketing helps a customer go to business X rather than business Y then value is being created.

"marketing helps a customer go to business X rather than business Y"

That is a succinct description of a zero-sum game.

* Business X gains the same amount business Y loses.

There is no additional value!

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#137

Post by penguat »

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/

I'd've thought some google.com domains would be a far clearer target?

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#138

Post by neurobro »

cm2012 wrote: post #124
neurobro wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's not really any similar techniques there, except that the tactics are a bit slimy. It's not like you can make an appeal to Google's Pathos.

With the rising prominence of sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, etc., I wouldn't rule out the possibility of appealing to Google's pathos in the near future. E.g. blog farms badmouthing competitors without even the hassle of building natural-looking links.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#139

Post by rpedroso »

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…

  So, I hope this stays, as far as I'm concerned google can shut down the disavow tool and those that lived by the sword should die by the sword. It's like an 'own goal' by the bad element in the SEO community.
A company I once worked at received Google search penalties about six months before hiring me. I quickly discovered a lot of the spammy links -- their old SEO vendor exploited the shady tactics that Panda/Penguin were designed to combat.

This wasn't the case of a content farm abusing SEO to ramp up their ad impressions: an innocent company was harmed by a black-hat SEO. The vendor handed in a report with rankings updates and number of links added every month, but nobody at the company was tracking the individual links and keeping track of the vendor's behavior.

I agree that spammy websites should be punished in their search rankings, but the link disavowal tool was integral to removing an innocent company's search penalties.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#140

Post by Isofarro »

lilsunnybee wrote: post #126
Isofarro wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignorance is not a valid defence. Yes, it's harsh, but that's what entrepreneurs sign up for when they start their own business. Directors of companies are held responsible for the decisions they made. Delegating that decision to others does not abrogate their responsibilities. If you are in the SEO industry, please stop hiding behind this. The SEO industry have had ample time and patience to clean itself up (naming…

I am not in the SEO industry, and said nothing in defense of unethical SEO practices. My parents are also very ethical people, and would only do business with others they felt were the same way. Just because someone participated in affiliate marketing in previous years, with consenting partner sites, before it was outlawed by Google, does not make them immoral and irresponsible. And besides paying Google to exist, no…

"Just because someone participated in affiliate marketing in previous years, with consenting partner sites, before it was outlawed by Google, does not make them immoral and irresponsible."

Interesting. Show me where in Google's guidelines Google says it outlaws affiliate marketing.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76465?hl=en -- seems to suggest it's okay in conjunction with a site that's producing good quality content.

Post reply on HN