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Negative SEO Does Exist

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Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#171

Post by bjterry »

jacquesm wrote: post #15
cosmie wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the same time google should be extra careful that it does now allow good websites to be penalized by activities from even shadier SEO types that turn around and use these facilities against their competitors (rather than to avoid being penalized by it themselves). That was the point being made - people are being targeted by their competitors , using the negative penalty from link farms to devalue competitor's si…

Yes, I know that is the point being made. But that's a very small bit of fall-out from a huge improvement. OP is right in fact but this is a rarity, overall google search results improved and the fact that the whole SEO world is in panic about this (proof in my inbox) is fantastic news. That it can be used for bad purposes is obvious, those that were gaming before will game this just as much. But rather than being in…

It's not a question of a false positive rate in this case, because the current false positive rate relies on the current baseline level of malicious actors. If they admit that there are false positives, then that will cause more malicious actions, which will increase the false positive rate. It's actually not clear right now whether google even tries to tell the difference between someone using spammy link building for themselves vs. someone using spammy link-building on a competitor. I don't even know where you'd begin on trying to figure out the difference, since you would never have any data to calibrate to.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#172

Post by bjterry »

Isofarro wrote: post #117
gscott wrote: post #79

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 fi…

"This method works 100% of the time" How many sites did you try this on? One? In your existing setup, how many competitors could you take out now before Google notices the pattern you've adopted? Take a look at the footprint: * Site suddenly acquires a new batch of incoming links * Same site is reported for being a recipient of a paid-for links scheme * Reporter uses the email address of (your email address here) --…

You are being insufficiently creative. If there are 10 competitors in your niche (and many will have more like 100), you can do this to five of them at random and google would have no way of determining who the perpetrator was. When you report them for paid-links, you wouldn't use your real e-mail address, that doesn't make any sense. There is no way to tell self backlinks from competitor backlinks. Both are attempted to be carried out in secret and in identical fashion from google's perspective. I could imagine a scenario where google sees that a niche has a bunch of people being targeted with backlinks, and so stops applying the penalty, but still they would have no way of targeting the bad actor.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#173

Post by rasz_pl »

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…

Google, lets stop pretending we are talking about any other search engines, will learn in time to identify and penalize source of spammy links instead of recipients. Webmasters should be responsible only for the content they have control over.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#174

Post by rasz_pl »

wlesieutre wrote: post #74
tomp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It doesnt take a genius to realize that when you identified 1 million bad links to XXX, and your database has 1.005 links to XXX, you should look carefully at the remaining 5K. Cross reference those sources against other suspicious links and so on.

Basically fight source of bad links, not recipients.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#175

Post by cosmie »

rfergie wrote: post #86
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's so obvious now you mention it :-) Any spammy link created now should simply be discarded, it either is an attack or it is a fool. Either way ignore

That means that, as a site owner, I would be free to engage in spam SEO. If it works, then I get rankings and traffic. If it doesn't then there is no harm to me and I can go try some new tactic

Exactly! Which is the exact scenario the recent update attempted to address: getting rid of the no harm aspect.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#176

Post by rfergie »

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!

There are more ways of generating value then just creating new customers.

For example, if the number of customers can be the same but if they are served better or cheaper than the competition then value is created

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#177

Post by gscott »

Isofarro wrote: post #117
gscott wrote: post #79

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 fi…

"This method works 100% of the time" How many sites did you try this on? One? In your existing setup, how many competitors could you take out now before Google notices the pattern you've adopted? Take a look at the footprint: * Site suddenly acquires a new batch of incoming links * Same site is reported for being a recipient of a paid-for links scheme * Reporter uses the email address of (your email address here) --…

I limited this to three websites, first being myself. There are a number of vendors who offer to promote your website but in such a horrific way that it blows your site up. That's is what I did with a site I was marketing I did it to myself, totally negative seo'd myself bad. It was awful and dumb too. So bad that Google didn't stop with just a notification they sent a special one saying "your site is harming the Internet" and they removed me totally couldn't find me by even searching a url.

I realized something powerful. I had the power to remove any website from Google. I could be a more evil Matt Cutt's. He can remove sites from Google and so can I.

It is a pretty awe inspiring power. It is like a terrible super power. I can "poof" a website gone from the source of around in my estimation about 90% of web traffic (Google's estimations are too low).

I was going to make a service offering my terrible super-power but decided not to. I relaunched the website I was working on and now never do anything dumb to myself. Now I pretty much only do social marketing because that is where Google is moving to. The days of lots of backlinks are pretty much over, I don't even bother except for making sure local profiles are all set up.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#178

Post by rfergie »

jacquesm wrote: post #132
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.

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…

Ok, let me be less vague:

If business X is 5% cheaper than business Y then value for the customer is created if they go to business X rather than Y.

In your example, no value is created at all if the product never sells no matter how good it might be in theory

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#179

Post by graeme »

jacquesm wrote: post #155
jshen wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

That's an interesting use case where search traffic and blog posts are an essential complement. Thank you for pointing that out.

There are plenty of other use cases. Tech is a bit unusual in that:

  * People stay in it permanently
  * People link to others freely
  * People have many non-commercial posts
Many other niches are temporary. For example, I work in LSAT prep. The LSAT is an exam north Americans have to take before entering law school. For 3-6 months, people are extremely interested in the LSAT, then they forget about it. There is a constant stream of entrants searching for information. Informational articles and search traffic is essential.

Similar cases:

  * Making a will
  * Selling a house
  * Writing a resume
I'll give one personal example. Recently, I wanted to read a King James Version of the Bible, for literary reasons. But it's hard to find a readable bible.

So I searched, and quickly found many articles by a site called Bible Design Blog. It's an incredible resource for bible printing and typography. I learned what I needed and got a bible.

And now I don't care about bible design, so I don't go to the site. I imagine he gets many similar visitors from organic traffic.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#180

Post by jacquesm »

bjterry wrote: post #171
jacquesm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I know that is the point being made. But that's a very small bit of fall-out from a huge improvement. OP is right in fact but this is a rarity, overall google search results improved and the fact that the whole SEO world is in panic about this (proof in my inbox) is fantastic news. That it can be used for bad purposes is obvious, those that were gaming before will game this just as much. But rather than being in…

It's not a question of a false positive rate in this case, because the current false positive rate relies on the current baseline level of malicious actors. If they admit that there are false positives, then that will cause more malicious actions, which will increase the false positive rate. It's actually not clear right now whether google even tries to tell the difference between someone using spammy link building f…

But of course there are false positives. It's a classifier, no classifier that is automated on something as fluid as relevancy for a particular user will be 100% spot on all the time.

Precision and recall can't be 100% accurate given a large enough set of inputs. That would be magic. You can try to do better, of course. But it will never be perfect and you'll never make everybody happy. False positives are a given. Matt was wrong when he said that, he pretty much had to be wrong due to the nature of the problem.

That he stuck to his guns is imo a mistake, that google can be manipulated into dropping sites from their rankings at the behest of others is a serious problem. Such unscrupulous behaviour should be punished, but then you get yet another layer of complexity in the arms race.

Basically you can read this whole saga as Google having to come to terms with the fact that even though they were a cut above altavista they too will have problems that no algorithm will solve.

Admitting that is probably above Matt's paygrade.

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