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Negative SEO Does Exist

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Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#191

Post by walshemj »

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…

Ok

I used to be in house SEO for a large publisher (wont say which one but you would know the name) one project we did was a recovery after a botched transition of a property website (similar presence to Zillow or right move) they screwed up their browse structure migration

I also detected and got fixed a mistake on a large UK recruitment site that was costing them £500,000 in 5 days.

Btw I am available at reasonable rates for consulting/ explaining to your developers how to do their job properly

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#192

Post by gscott »

Isofarro wrote: post #188
bjterry wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 attempte…

"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." For a pure blackhat operation, it would simply be the newest competitor. Blackhatters rarely play the long game, they are used to burn-and-churn operations. They wouldn't have the patience to keep an unprofitable site running. It…

You can negative seo a site out of existence in about two hours and for about $75. It is actually super quick. Once you do it, it can take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months for the site to loose it's position or be removed.

Just go to freelancer.com market. Buy several xRumer packages. Now do the same thing on Fiverr with some other various packages. Now go to Text-Link-Ads and buy some $8 dollar links and link them to your target website.

Personally, I do not do this except for a couple of years ago when Google first created negative seo. If you are trying to create backlinks to yourself it is too risky because Google will penalize you even if you are a small fry. I just make sure all of the local listings are set up (I only market small businesses that are local) and then do social marketing. Social marketing is the new backlinks. They don't last as long as backlinks and it is more effort, but that is where it pretty much is in my estimation now. To be successful in Google you can do it with about 10-30 backlinks and social marketing. Things have changed a lot since the Caffeine update.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#193

Post by jshen »

jacquesm wrote: post #187
jshen wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you'll find that your information gets drowned out by content that has been SEO'd to the hilt. But even if that were the case I'd blame the SEO guys, not the search engine." Maybe, but the part that bothers me is that if you listen to Matt Cutt's he basically says that you should make good content, make a good user experience, build a relationship with your audience, and not think about SEO explicitly. This isn't tr…

> Maybe, but the part that bothers me is that if you listen to Matt Cutt's he basically says that you should make good content, make a good user experience, build a relationship with your audience, and not think about SEO explicitly. This isn't true for large swathes of content types. I'd go one step further and I'd say: stop making sites that only exist by the grace of search engines. Not that anybody will listen to…

anti-trust is broader than your definition. From wikipedia.

"United States antitrust law is a collection of federal and state government laws, which regulates the conduct and organization of business corporations, generally to promote fair competition for the benefit of consumers. The main statutes are the Sherman Act 1890, the Clayton Act 1914 and the Federal Trade Commission Act 1914. These Acts, first, restrict the formation of cartels and prohibit other collusive practices regarded as being in restraint of trade. Second, they restrict the mergers and acquisitions of organizations which could substantially lessen competition. Third, they prohibit the creation of a monopoly and the abuse of monopoly power."

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#194

Post by DontBeADick »

jacquesm wrote: post #164
DontBeADick wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

I don't need to know you better, I'm just more honest about who you are.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#195

Post by Isofarro »

jacquesm wrote: post #180
bjterry wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. M…

"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."

There are two main ways of dealing with issues:

* Prevent them from happening

* Mitigate the risk so the fallout is minimised if it does happen

Because there are flaws in the first way doesn't mean the second hasn't been explored or carried out.

We mitigate risk all the time. Seat-belts, looking both ways before crossing the street, insurance. The entire banking system.

So you get hit with a manual penalty for spammy links. Deal with it. Document it in great detail, publish it, share it with Google. Then SEOers will have both the data they need and a Google rep to talk to. Plus, if it is as terrifying as SEOers keep telling us it is, the news headline boost alone will make up for the link profile damage.

I think I know why SEOers are in an uproar about this: they'll have to collaborate with Google on a new level of openness. Effectively, recipients of negative SEO attacks, who then notify Google, will also have a nice shiny Google light shone on their SEO tactics leading up to the negative SEO attack. And I guess almost all SEOers have done something they are not entirely proud of, or wish to be forthcoming about. It's the fear of being seen as something other than completely white-hat.

The ways to avoid reaching that uncomfortable point is:

* Hope their fellow SEOers don't hit them first with a negative SEO attack

* Hope Google reverses this decision, so they don't have to venture down that road.

It's a bit like that Simsons sketch where the whole family are in a shock therapy session:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP4INdt_-fk

The SEO fear is one of their fellow SEOers pressing the button.

Hopefully it will make them more forthcoming in cleaning up their industry. A bit of public naming and shaming would be nice.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#196

Post by xxs »

Ryan_Jones wrote: post #150
logicallee wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They will just =not count= more stuff - same as negative counting. Overall the entire ranking business depending on external links instead of the actual content will always be exploitable to some degree.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#197

Post by squeaky-clean »

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…

I've found dozens of good blogs through Google. You've never had a problem that you googled and found a solution on someone's blog before?

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#198

Post by graeme »

jacquesm wrote: post #182
graeme wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 consta…

So you as a user were well served in your searches. That's the bit that google cares about most I would assume. Whether or not you went to 'bible design blog', 'design bible blog', 'bible typography.info' and whoever else they compete with (I just made those up) is of secondary importance. The problem sits there where you would not find good content to serve your needs. And if you feel that this update impacts that g…

Well, maybe. If someone destroyed bible design blog's ranking, then I wouldn't have known I missed a superior option. I would have found stuff, but no competitors were as good.

The main incentive for negative SEO would be to let inferior content win, no?

I do agree in general that google works extraordinarily well for the user in most cases. Your point is clearer now.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#199

Post by [deleted] »

gscott wrote: post #192
Isofarro wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." For a pure blackhat operation, it would simply be the newest competitor. Blackhatters rarely play the long game, they are used to burn-and-churn operations. They wouldn't have the patience to keep an unprofitable site running. It…

You can negative seo a site out of existence in about two hours and for about $75. It is actually super quick. Once you do it, it can take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months for the site to loose it's position or be removed. Just go to freelancer.com market. Buy several xRumer packages. Now do the same thing on Fiverr with some other various packages. Now go to Text-Link-Ads and buy some $8 dollar links and link them…

[deleted]

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#200

Post by chrismcb »

jacquesm wrote: post #106
vectorpush wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

It isn't just about the web site owner and their traffic... It is also about you. Don't you want Google to give you good results? Wouldn't you be unhappy if the best result got hidden on page 50 because someone link spammed them?
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