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

141–150 of 228 posts

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#141

Post by moistgorilla »

jacquesm wrote: post #121
antjanus wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one thing another thing is that just because my blog is non-commercial doesn't mean it shouldn't rank. I monetized it recently and would like to continue making some cash off it (to cover costs and as an incentive and excuse to continue doing this). On top of that, I like to write, the more people read my shit, the more I'm excited to write. What sucks about this entire dilemma is that we're all looking at "lo…

Forgive me for being stupid, but what does google have to do with all this? It's the last source of traffic that I would think of when it comes to blogging, I could be completely wrong about this but I can't imagine that's the way to to it. What would do it is: interesting articles, a userbase that likes what you write and passes it to their friends, a reputation for quality and useful articles, people linking to you…

When I search for an article on some new tech or a tutorial for some library or such I almost always get a few blogs with good content. Many of those blogs have books written by the owners which they advertise on the subject they blog about. I buy those sometimes. Basically, google is a good source of traffic for blogs.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#142

Post by dang »

DontBeADick wrote: post #99
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?

Please stop being personally rude in HN comments.

This comment would be better if, in addition to not being personally rude, it told us what the main point of the article really is.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#143

Post by Isofarro »

nekitamo wrote: post #95
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.…

"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."

There's a filter you've missed there - those people are only at the mercy of negative SEO when they stand in the way of an SEO practitioner and financial gain.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#144

Post by tobltobs »

jacquesm wrote: post #121
antjanus wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one thing another thing is that just because my blog is non-commercial doesn't mean it shouldn't rank. I monetized it recently and would like to continue making some cash off it (to cover costs and as an incentive and excuse to continue doing this). On top of that, I like to write, the more people read my shit, the more I'm excited to write. What sucks about this entire dilemma is that we're all looking at "lo…

Forgive me for being stupid, but what does google have to do with all this? It's the last source of traffic that I would think of when it comes to blogging, I could be completely wrong about this but I can't imagine that's the way to to it. What would do it is: interesting articles, a userbase that likes what you write and passes it to their friends, a reputation for quality and useful articles, people linking to you…

Are you trolling?

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#145

Post by UweSchmidt »

SquareWheel wrote: post #98
jacquesm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

The activities that you've described seem quite basic: either something that any amateur can do by following a todo list, if the CMS doesn't take care of that anyway (prompt for alt tags, have sane URLs as default etc.).

While the SEO industry might be doing that also, that seems to be a fig leave for the actual activities.

Or is anyone making a living being the caretaker of the web, cleaning up 404s?

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#146

Post by jshen »

jacquesm wrote: post #121
antjanus wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one thing another thing is that just because my blog is non-commercial doesn't mean it shouldn't rank. I monetized it recently and would like to continue making some cash off it (to cover costs and as an incentive and excuse to continue doing this). On top of that, I like to write, the more people read my shit, the more I'm excited to write. What sucks about this entire dilemma is that we're all looking at "lo…

Forgive me for being stupid, but what does google have to do with all this? It's the last source of traffic that I would think of when it comes to blogging, I could be completely wrong about this but I can't imagine that's the way to to it. What would do it is: interesting articles, a userbase that likes what you write and passes it to their friends, a reputation for quality and useful articles, people linking to you…

This is a rather arrogant comment. Why assume that everyone fits the same niche as you? I once ran a site/blog where I blogged about a particular disease that I have and all of the research I did as I tried to understand it. This means that my content was typically found by people who have just come down with this disease and turn to google to search for information. I did not have a relationship with these readers prior to them getting this disease.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#147

Post by Isofarro »

DontBeADick wrote: post #135
jacquesm wrote: post #112

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? 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…

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

These changes are clearly hurting SEOers who practice massive link building regardless of quality, too. That is a good thing.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#148

Post by graeme »

jacquesm wrote: post #127
mfjordvald wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with a blog, the size of my audience matters a lot, knowing I actually have people reading what I put out there matters a lot. Having people interact with my content or tell me it helped them sure does motivate me as well. If I lost my search engine traffic that'd account for half of my daily traffic. (only around 500-600 people so not huge) If that happened that'd be pretty demotivating.

> If that happened that'd be pretty demotivating. Ok, that's a good reason. But when you started blogging you did not have any visitors at all, you must have done it for some other reason. And when you have 1200 visitors (say a year from now) per day and you lose half your visitors per day (because they are search engine traffic) and you're back to 600 you could still argue that you lost your motivation. How many vis…

>But when you started blogging you did not have any visitors at all, you must have done it for some other reason.

Or maybe they expected that if they blogged, they would get visitors? It's pretty well known that if you put good stuff on the internet, people will find it, including through google.

>And when you have 1200 visitors (say a year from now) per day and you lose half your visitors per day (because they are search engine traffic) and you're back to 600 you could still argue that you lost your motivation.

Yes, it's always true that it hurts to lose a source of traffic. I don't follow your point.

>How many visitors come to your site is just a number. What you get out of th engagement is the key imo, and in that sense 50 people that you engage with are worth 500 that just visit and look at what you write.

This is true, but you seem to be assuming that google visitors are less engaged. Why? My time on site is highest for organic search traffic.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#149

Post by spankalee »

jacquesm wrote: post #121
antjanus wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one thing another thing is that just because my blog is non-commercial doesn't mean it shouldn't rank. I monetized it recently and would like to continue making some cash off it (to cover costs and as an incentive and excuse to continue doing this). On top of that, I like to write, the more people read my shit, the more I'm excited to write. What sucks about this entire dilemma is that we're all looking at "lo…

Forgive me for being stupid, but what does google have to do with all this? It's the last source of traffic that I would think of when it comes to blogging, I could be completely wrong about this but I can't imagine that's the way to to it. What would do it is: interesting articles, a userbase that likes what you write and passes it to their friends, a reputation for quality and useful articles, people linking to you…

As a Google _user_ I care a lot about this issue. A lot of the technical topics and questions I search for are answered best by blog posts from people who've solved the same issue, or are an authority. I don't want them thrown out with the spam, and I don't want all such content to have to be hosted on sites like Stack Overflow to be findable.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#150

Post by Ryan_Jones »

logicallee wrote: post #81
rlpb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes. It's certainly a slippery slope but we can navigate it intelligently (as we do with defamation) and it's worth it to keep people from building link farms pointing to a competitor so that Google will punish them.

The solution isn't to make linking illegal - it's for Google to stop the penalizing and just simply not count the links they don't like. Penalize for on-site stuff, just ignore the off site stuff.

I realize they want to take away the incentive for spammers, but let's shift the burden of finding a better way to do that onto them instead of changing the laws about how the web works.

Post reply on HN