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Negative SEO Does Exist

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Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#211

Post by lifeisstillgood »

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…

I don't fully understand this. How did you look at your link profile? Is this a blessed google thing ? And how do you know your drop in rankings is down to this back link issue - what if other people have written better stuff (apologies !)

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#212

Post by jacquesm »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #209
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…

Perhaps ask your "madebyabi" associate whose front page links to http://www.projectweb.gr/seo-consultant.html if you're interested in the work of SEO consultants? 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/htt…

Abi made the logo and did some of the css, he did so in record time after I put in a call here on HN if there was someone that could do some design. I was not aware of his SEO activities and I promise solemnly that he did not do anything of the sort for reocities. You're really trying very hard here to tie me to SEO activity, I have no idea what it is that you think you're proving but I'm not going to lose any sleep over that.

As for the rest of your rather long comment, in creating reocities, I, right along with archive team and a bunch of others performed a public service, at considerable expense both in time and funds I might add.

If you feel that your content was copied unjustly then you are free to use the self-service tool to remove it, and if you can't use the self service tool then I'll remove it for you on first request (assuming you are the author of the content).

I've received many thousands of notes from people who were extremely happy their content got saved, and many thousands of requests to remove content, the vast majority of which have been honored. A few by people who are not the original creators were not honored (most of these: SEO scum trying to increase the visibility of their customers by attempting to force offline pages that they don't like).

If you feel like mis-characterizing this you're totally welcome to do so, but I fear that that says more about you than it does about me.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#213

Post by lmm »

jacquesm wrote: post #103
lmm wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who are you to determine what a low quality website is? Who is Google to? Google is no more neutral or accountable than SEO folk, and is just as much a profit-oriented business as they are. Google makes the rules and the rest of us play by them. And surprisingly enough, Google encourages the behaviour it rewards. If Google's policies are pro-evil I'd rather that evil be done by competent, organized professionals (w…

Feel free to build you own search engine! The more the merrier, especially if they can get up to the scale of Google. Monoculture is bad, especially when monoculture leads to diseases attacking the one strain that dominates. On the other hand we could of course try to (reaching here) argue that these SEO's improve google because they are forcing it to up its game but I think the web as a whole would be better off wit…

> we could of course try to (reaching here) argue that these SEO's improve google because they are forcing it to up its game but I think the web as a whole would be better off without all this crap.

The alternative is what, that the result you'd get for, I don't know, "home insurance" would be essentially random?

Google has some opinion on what properties the best result for that would have. Sites will naturally conform to the google policy (which is good when google promotes things that are good for the general web, like fast load times and accessible markup, and bad when google promotes things that are bad for the general web). The SEO industry just makes this process more efficient, meaning changes to what Google "wants" in results take effect faster. Even if Google's policies were effectively random (which I don't think they are), the worst-case result would be that businesses who paid attention to keeping their SEO up to date would appear higher in search results than businesses which didn't - which is at least some kind of barometer of a healthy business.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#214

Post by jacquesm »

walshemj wrote: post #190
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…

Your scraping geocities for MFA and your trashing SEOs :-) a good example Cognitive dissonance -you certainty have a lot of Chutzpah. golf clap

I think you're projecting here. Reocities cost a ton of money to create, costs money to run and has $0 income. What you would do with it is a totally different matter, I just run it as a public service and if I shut it down tomorrow I'll have more money next month than I do today.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#215

Post by gscott »

Isofarro wrote: post #203
gscott wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

" 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. " 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 ass…

I never said the idea was a good one, it's a bad one of course. One which I don't believe many people are doing thankfully. Myself I am not doing it because I don't want to reduce the quality of results from adding hundreds of thousands of spam listings. However, I was angry before about Google's actions on a site I was managing and acted out. I am calm and rational now.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#216

Post by tiglionabbit »

programminggeek wrote: post #32

I think there are two issues at play. 1) Google massively discounted exact match domains, so if you were ranking well before because of an EMD, don't expect to now. 2) Negative SEO has always been a possibility, but a lot of sites aren't helping themselves either. For like a decade now, there have been plenty of shady link networks where you could get millions of links. It would not be difficult to get millions of sp…

He could check how long the spam sites have existed by using archive.org.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#217

Post by matnewton85 »

3RqGFE22ZMuOXNU wrote: post #82
matnewton85 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I completely agree, someone needs to drop these low quality sites out of the top 10 in Google. Here is a typical example of a website that I think needs negative SEOing: http://www.matthewnewton.net/

Go for it dude, not trying to rank it for anything.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#218

Post by matnewton85 »

jacquesm wrote: post #42
matnewton85 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Negative SEO is part of the toolkit of any competent SEO professional nowadays. The fact that you feel you represent the SEO professional community and that it is part of the standard toolkit to me is proof positive that the whole SEO community is a morally bankrupt bunch. It's just shades of gray all the way to 'black', parasitic rather than symbiotic and a net negative. How you guys sleep at night is a mystery to…

Hey Jacques

Sorry for the delay, I don't come to HN very often.

I sleep quite easily at night. Google is very bad at what they do when it comes to spam. They deliberately under-resource their spam team and have maintained a fairly incompetent hack managing said team for a long time now. Their motivations? Anyone's guess, but that's the fact of the matter.

Search for payday loans and this result comes up on page 2:

http://www.suryavanshi.org/disadvantages-of-payday-loans.php

This page is spam, pure and simple and falls foul of Google's own guidelines.

> Who are you to determine what a low quality website is?

Google puts out these guidelines so people can determine the quality of websites. Pure and simple.

Unfortunately, their own algorithm isn't good at recognising these bad actors.

This is where Negative SEO comes in. As stated elsewhere, nSEO is only genuinely possible where a site is sitting on the edge (as above) OR, unfortunately, to attack small businesses.

I'm NEVER going to attack a legitimate business. I AM going to attack spammers, and YES my clients do benefit.

I don't like spammers, you don't like spammers, and it just so turns out that Google is not so great at dealing with them, mostly because they don't care that much.

Quite frankly, I'm not going to sit around and wait for them to haul their asses into gear 18 months later to fix it.

I don't just do nSEO, I also report spam listings to TripAdvisor and any other site who listens to my spam notifications. Of course my competitors benefit when I remove spam to their advantage. Why shouldn't they?

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#219

Post by matnewton85 »

gk1 wrote: post #55
cm2012 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have any skin in the game, but what if we do a thought experiment? You are a marketer who is running a big physical sign in real life near some intersection, selling widgets. There are always 10 other signs there. There is one very overworked official who checks the signs to make sure they aren't overtly bad for people looking at them. You notice that two of the signs competing with your client blatantly say…

You make a great point, but there's already a way to plant that "red flag": You can report websites for bad behavior to Google.[0] It's a different thing entirely to take matters into your own hands and plant dynamite under the "bad signs." [0] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en

Ever tried it? Trust me, it doesn't work.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#220

Post by matnewton85 »

rwhitman wrote: post #72
jacquesm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Negative SEO is part of the toolkit of any competent SEO professional nowadays. The fact that you feel you represent the SEO professional community and that it is part of the standard toolkit to me is proof positive that the whole SEO community is a morally bankrupt bunch. It's just shades of gray all the way to 'black', parasitic rather than symbiotic and a net negative. How you guys sleep at night is a mystery to…

Scolding pro blackhat SEO guys is an effort in futility. And the fact he confirmed using the technique also means that its no longer as effective I'm sure most of his customers have no idea what he's doing either. With these guys its don't ask don't tell relationship. "I'll get your rank up for XYZ keywords for $70k a month but don't ask any questions on how". They do 15 minutes of work a day maintaining some link wh…

correction, I'm a whitehat SEO who fights blackhat SEOs.
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