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Negative SEO Does Exist

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Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#161

Post by jacquesm »

tobltobs wrote: post #144
jacquesm wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Is it possible that if someone has a different point of view about some issue after having given the matter some thought that they are not trolling?

If that's a possibility then you already have your answer, I would not put this much time and effort into a discussion if I were merely doing this to piss other people off.

Trolls typically don't go around with their name and reputation in full view on controversial topics.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#162

Post by jacquesm »

ameister14 wrote: post #153
jacquesm wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the bit where we have a right to traffic. That's maybe naive, but just like I don't expect customers to beat their way to my door through some act of magic I don't expect visitors to come to my website either. If I want them there I have to go and engage them. That's marketing, building customer relationships and so on. Hard work, and definitely not easy money but it is very hard to assail that from the positi…

I disagree with your second statement. If I run a gas station along a heavily trafficked street, is that a mistake? I have one source of customer; people aren't going to be loyal to my services enough to drive for them. If the traffic on the street lessens, I can lose business. It doesn't mean it's a bad idea to buy or build the gas station there.

Yes, if the traffic on the street lessens then you will lose (some) business. But where is the unfairness in that? You don't actually have a right to business.

And if people are not loyal that's a serious problem with either the line of business you are in or your relationship with your customer.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#163

Post by nekitamo »

Isofarro wrote: post #143
nekitamo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"those people are only at the mercy of negative SEO when they stand in the way of an SEO practitioner and financial gain."

In practice this is almost never. If you're SEOing in a small niche it's very easy to simply outrank the competition if you know what you're doing. It would take many more resources to knock out the dozen of sites in the SERPs above you, and even if you did it's not guaranteed that your own site would replace them.

The only time you would want to knock out your competition with negative SEO is if you're hovering around 5-10 on a high value high volume keyword, but in the real world sites that rank for those kinds of keywords have millions of legitimate backlinks, and it's next to impossible to negative SEO them.

So personally I've never seen a situation in which the time and resources expended in negative SEO would be justified. Even for reputation management it makes sense to rank dozens of your own sites rather than knock out all the "bad" competing site.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#164

Post by jacquesm »

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…

Not caring about google includes not caring about whether they do or do not send traffic to my site. As you are no doubt aware because you have done so much work to research this there is no advertising on the blog. If people find it through google I'm perfectly ok with that. But I won't bend over backwards to make sure more people will find it, nor will I take action to ensure less people will find it.

The rest of your comment seems to presume you know me better than I know myself so I'll leave that without a reply, but I'm happy that we have established that your original comment was a load of nonsense.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#165

Post by kwijybobyjiwk »

Isofarro wrote: post #136
rfergie wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Business X may easily gain more than business Y loses, if the site cleanup yields a site that's easier to find, has more descriptive content, and is more accessible. Y's previously higher ranking may have caused some potential buyers in a product space to abandon looking--even if temporarily--due to lack of time or loss of interest. X might have a good product that missed some sales due to a "meh" reaction to Y's previously higher-ranked site.

Marketing effect can be difficult to quantify, but it's about more than ad dollars and the bottom line is definitely not a zero-sum game. While SEO doesn't lack for bad actors, white-hat SEO can help grow markets.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#166

Post by fuire8 »

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…

and who are to knock them out ?

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#167

Post by leephillips »

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…

Imagine how much worse you'd feel if you found out that someone who doesn't like you did this to you deliberately.

Google makes this too easy. Through ill-considered changes to their algorithms they've provided a new weapon for the unscrupulous.

I've noticed a similar thing with my own personal site. For years it was on Google's front page for a bunch of things (niche topics that wouldn't translate into money). So was my name, which really surprised me. Lately, as it's gotten more links to it from higher profile sources, including some national magazine sites, it's rapidly fallen back in Google's listings.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#168

Post by gabemart »

nekitamo wrote: post #163
Isofarro wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

"those people are only at the mercy of negative SEO when they stand in the way of an SEO practitioner and financial gain." In practice this is almost never. If you're SEOing in a small niche it's very easy to simply outrank the competition if you know what you're doing. It would take many more resources to knock out the dozen of sites in the SERPs above you, and even if you did it's not guaranteed that your own site…

> If you're SEOing in a small niche it's very easy to simply outrank the competition if you know what you're doing.

Is this really true? I struggle to imagine how generating legitimate and high-value backlinks is easy, even for a small niche.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#169

Post by ameister14 »

jacquesm wrote: post #162
ameister14 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your second statement. If I run a gas station along a heavily trafficked street, is that a mistake? I have one source of customer; people aren't going to be loyal to my services enough to drive for them. If the traffic on the street lessens, I can lose business. It doesn't mean it's a bad idea to buy or build the gas station there.

Yes, if the traffic on the street lessens then you will lose (some) business. But where is the unfairness in that? You don't actually have a right to business. And if people are not loyal that's a serious problem with either the line of business you are in or your relationship with your customer.

I'm not saying it's unfair. I'm saying you can enter into a business where you have a competitive advantage based on location and run said business profitably, and that's not a mistake.

If it didn't work, we would have no gas stations. I don't know about you, but I'm not so loyal to a particular gas station that I would drive farther to reach it if there were others more convenient to me that offered the same service for the same price. That doesn't mean it's a bad business. It means there is competition with fairly exact substitutes, and location is a big part of success.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#170

Post by tambourine_man »

We desperately need open and distributed database and search algorithms. As it stands now, we are at the mercy of a company's competence and benevolence.

Google is getting less usable by the day. Verbatim and code search don't work anymore and the relevance of results keep decreasing dispite the many revision animals they release.

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