Negative SEO Does Exist

This doesn't scale without drawing attention to yourself.

It doesn't scale for an individual SEOer as a repeatable approach to ranking ahead of your competition. Most likely, it's mutually assured destruction - SEOers destroying each other, taking their clients with them.

It doesn't scale across the SEO industry. Too many people take this up as a tool, and the quality of Google search results suffer. That's when Google takes further action.

The one main way negative SEO back linking survives as a reusable technique is if it's used in small unnoticeable doses, and doesn't affect the typical Google user. Because when it does impact mainstream Google users, then Google takes the next step forward.

If the nightmare scenario materialises where SEOers destroy search quality results for mainstream users with negative SEO campaigns, Google flips the "spammy link penalty" off, all those sites affected bounce back immediately.

And then Google will comb through the data they've captured in that time period, and have an improved idea of what link sources are spammy. Google will have a much better idea of the network of sites you used (to benefit yourself before the penalty, and to negatively affect your competition during the penalty). It will stand out.

SEOers are in a classical prisoners dilemma.

Makes sense to me.

* Take a snapshot of the link graph

* Hit spammers hard with negative penalties.

* Wait for vengeful SEOers to target their competition with negative SEO, and for the search results quality for mainstream users to noticeably drop

* Switch off the negative penalty flag -- Innocent competitors targeted by SEO negative SEO bounce right back

* Compare the before and after link graph.

* Update the list of low-quality link sources.

* Google wins because it has found a lot more spammy link sources than before.

* Spammers lose because their sites drop even further as previously okay link sources are now determined to be spammy

When you play a incomplet-information game with Google, you need to make sure you are not inadvertently providing them more information by changing your tactics. By changing your link building habits because of a negative link penalty, you are giving Google more information than before, you are confirming more link sources are not natural.

The smartest thing you can do is not to be tempted into negative SEOing your competitors. You are only burning the back links Google haven't flagged as spammy yet. So either keep doing what you were doing before the penalty, or stop building spammy back links. But playing with negative SEO plays straight into Google's hands.

At least, risk someone else's private link network, rather than your own ones when doing negative SEO. :-)

For all you know a superior option existed but you don't know about it because 'bible design blog's SEO guy torpedoed them. I know that's reaching, especially given the subject matter but you get the point.

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

I'm sure the SEO proponents would claim the exact opposite. We trust in Google to do the right thing here and I'm all for letting it be that way, but google is under no obligation to actually let the best content win. We hope they do, and we assume that our goals are aligned in this respect but frankly I have no idea how for the top 1,000,000 searches the actually achieved precision is. I would expect it to be quite high, but I have absolutely no way of verifying that and for all I know the results are junk. We will only know that that was the case when something better comes along and finds/ranks the content much better than Google does now. Comparing to Bing Google is doing ok, comparing to DDG is not fair given the relative sizes.

But I'd be one very happy person if a new search engine appeared that would give me exactly one page of results with all of them super relevant, even if it indexed only 10% of the web I would probably use it with some regularity. Quality is far more important than quantity.

FWIW I actually built a small search engine along those lines about 7 years ago, I never launched it because I simply don't have the resources to undertake such a project but I learned a ton about how hard the problem is that google tries to solve and even though I'm 100% at odds with them on the joint subjects of privacy and the way google+ gets rammed down my throat I do appreciate the difficulty of their position and the technical challenges involved in operating a search engine at this scale.

Considering reocities vs. archive.org and in light of copyright law:

Is reocities a registered non-profit organisation? Do archive.org do this - http://imgur.com/vKHha2M to pages to add donation links? (Answer: https://web.archive.org/web/20100218100003/http://www.geocit...). This used to be called "framing" and was considered about the scummiest thing domain owners could do - wrap other peoples content in a frame that was intended to harvest money, or rebadge, without doing anything else.

This was just a random page choice (the imgur.com) link. It's interesting to note they expected the page to be withdrawn, except now it's still here. Archive.org record, at least, that the content owner removed all content and the [new?] domain owner 302ed the site to http://www.ki-society.com/english/.

Archive.org, along with Google, at least at some point was committing copyright infringement in the USA I believe. In the UK (probably NL too by virtue of EU legislation) both these bodies, and the likes of reocities, definitely are still acting tortuously. In USA Field vs Google established a change to the Fair Use rulings that considered SERPs to be transformative and that cached copies - as temporary and unmodified (neither of which reocities pages are) - should be allowed in view of the transformative nature (the court effectively asserting that Google's copy wouldn't be used for content viewing !!).

Internet Archive were sued in 2007 by Shell, http://archive.org/post/119669/lawsuit-settled, and settled stating that Shell's copyright was "valid and enforceable". Internet Archive were sued in 2005 (Healthcare Advocates v.) for failing to remove past archives when a site owner had updated their robots.txt - clearly reocities have no way of assessing a current content owners wishes as to continued archiving.

There is a library exclusion in the USC for archiving digital content (http://fairuse.stanford.edu/2003/11/10/digital_preservation_...) but it requires the content to be kept off-line and only accessible by those physically present. This could be used, or donation of the content to Archive.org or such, if the purpose of the reocities project was simply preservation for posterity.

Aside: The facts of tortuous infringement aren't at all related to my ability to raise finance and sue you on behalf of those content creators whose content you copied without permission (AFAICT none of my content made it through FWIW). I have no wish to at this time. Although presumably I'd only need to issue a DMCA take-down notice as otherwise the domain itself could be targeted for take-down (as it's a .com). But, like Google, I don't think you care if reocities is copyright infringing, do you? You appear to consider the law to be errant and so choose to ignore it.

tl;dr reocities is not transformative (it's just a "framed" copy), is potentially modified without license, is commercial (ie is not registered non-profit and requests donations and is used for SEO purposes (eg footer links to an SEO!)). Ergo not Fair Use in USA (where the content was copied from).