Negative SEO Does Exist • Hacker News Board

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#221

Post by rfergie » Thu, Jun 19, 2014, 6:59 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #204

rfergie wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree about "typically" although I certainly agree that marketing can be used in that way. Why is value much more likely to be destroyed as a result of marketing? Per unit of product I can see that this is the case as some of the value must be spent on marketing, but if more product is sold than would have been otherwise extra value can be created overall. Engineers are also not philanthropists. I don'…

> Per unit of product I can see that this is the case as some of the value must be spent on marketing You got it perfectly. > but if more product is sold than would have been otherwise extra value can be created overall. But selling product does not equate to value creation, it equates to an exchange. I'm not sure why I am incapable of communicating this point more clearly, but value creation is a totally different t…

"selling product does not equate to value creation, it equates to an exchange."

I think this is the bit I don't understand. Will have a think and get back to you

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#222

Post by antjanus » Thu, Jun 19, 2014, 1:56 PM UTC

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #211

antjanus wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 !)

There are several tools out there which scan your backlink profile and give you a report on your backlinks. They usually scan the sites and give you a "danger" rating for those sites. I can't remember the name of the tool I used but I had nearly 20K links in the "danger" rating. Half of them were super-spammy sites that simply repost what you already posted, the other half was a mix of bloggers (good and bad).

Usually you can tell that it's because of that issue when a major penguin update goes out, and your rank suddenly drops. To confirm it, you'd disavow the bad links (so, the link farms that link back to you, the reposters, reblogers, spammy affiliate sites etc.) and see how it affects your ranking and exposure.

It worked VERY well for me once everything was said and done.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#223

Post by rfergie » Thu, Jun 19, 2014, 4:39 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #204

rfergie wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree about "typically" although I certainly agree that marketing can be used in that way. Why is value much more likely to be destroyed as a result of marketing? Per unit of product I can see that this is the case as some of the value must be spent on marketing, but if more product is sold than would have been otherwise extra value can be created overall. Engineers are also not philanthropists. I don'…

> Per unit of product I can see that this is the case as some of the value must be spent on marketing You got it perfectly. > but if more product is sold than would have been otherwise extra value can be created overall. But selling product does not equate to value creation, it equates to an exchange. I'm not sure why I am incapable of communicating this point more clearly, but value creation is a totally different t…

Where is the value created if the product is never sold?

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#224

Post by squeaky-clean » Thu, Jun 19, 2014, 8:32 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #208

squeaky-clean wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You have switched the perspective to the user now. That's fine with me but the original complaint was by the website owners. If google no longer finds solutions on blogs that's a problem but that shifts the debate from the one that we originally had, which is that some blogs no longer receive the traffic they did in the past. If that means other blogs with relevant content receive that traffic instead then from the u…

I never said it was a problem for the users. Just that I, as a user, find many blogs that I now follow because I googled a result. It's very unfair to a website if a user searches for something, and finds someone else's blog because my website dropped in google's ranking because of something beyond my control.

I was just showing that Google certainly is not the last traffic source for bloggers, it's probably the largest traffic source. Sure a devoted userbase gets you traffic, but it doesn't really grow traffic. Having your articles on other outlets grows traffic. And Google is a very good outlet when someone is trying to find relevant information.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#225

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 19, 2014, 8:44 PM UTC

Isofarro wrote: post #205

squeaky-clean wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How many times can this weapon be used before it leaves a nice juicy fingerprint, or sources of negative links become over saturated. How many times can spamming and link boosting be uses before it leaves a finger-print, or the spam just gets over-saturated? Apparently infinite. If they haven't fixed positive SEO (and with these new updates spamming is still as effective as ever), I don't think they can add an entir…

"because Google has now given other websites the ability to destroy your rankings. That just doesn't make sense." 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 compet…

[deleted]

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#226

Post by Dylan16807 » Fri, Jun 20, 2014, 12:46 AM UTC

Fuzzwah wrote: post #115

Dylan16807 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're doing very strange things to the analogy. To be closer to the real activities, it's like putting a bunch of red flags under the sign. Nobody (except the city coucil) actually touches the target sign. Nobody actually touches the target website. There is no direct attacking going on.

The road is diverted so that people driving on the road can no longer see the sign.....

Google / city council does that. The SEO actor does nothing to the target, only to influence google.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#227

Post by tripzilch » Fri, Jun 20, 2014, 1:16 AM UTC

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…

> I'd go one step further and I'd say: stop making sites that only exist by the grace of search engines.

You are aware that there are large (enormous) swathes of Internet users whose primary mode of navigation is typing whatever they want to visit into Google, trusting it'll correct their (terrible) misspellings, and click one of the first few links of the first result page?

There will type URLs there. Like "Apple.com". Because they don't know what URLs are for, any more.

It sounds to me, if you really suggest to stop making sites for these people, you're not actually aware how numerous they are. They are both the old, and the new generations.

Yes it's sad this is the case. But they are people. What if they are searching for some niche information (like a disease, as another poster already pointed out), but the honest blog post that'd be useful for them has been torpedoed out of the water with this "negative SEO", in favour of some scummy SEO site trying to sell them ineffective fake medicine (or whatever).

Is that too far-fetched? I don't know, but it seems to me that giving evil SEOers the power to blast sites from Google's index by abusing "negative SEO", is a bad thing in general. Your argument seems to be that it'll give SEOers a taste of their own medicine, which I agree that will probably happen. But there will be collateral too, and I don't think that's worth it.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#228

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sat, Jun 21, 2014, 1:58 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #212

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>You're really trying very hard here to tie me to SEO activity //

I was merely suggesting that the guy that did your website might not be the scum of the Earth you seem to believe all SEOs are and thinking that - as you appear to judge characters well in general, obv. not mine ;0) - he might be able to disavow you of that notion. When he designed your reocities layout he designed in on-page SEO ... horror! Indeed his prime motivation might well have been the footer link, perhaps he is evil after all.

OK, so 'everyone loves reocities' (many people love torrent hosts too); but it's still a massive copyright infringement. Personally I think the content that people cared about was saved, moved, backed up already and that very little would have been lost that was worth keeping. The real value was to harvest the content to stick an ad-block or donation wrapper around it.

The point where we started [my paraphrase of course] was that you ostensibly said "all SEO are scum" and I said that as you were able to see past your own tortuous activities to see your perceived good in them I found it strange that you'd classify everyone working in SEO, like your web-designer, that way.

I find it really hard to see how you think making sure a website gets a deserved position in the SERPs (yes SEO can be used nefariously too, I'm not denying that) is so evil. Yet you think wrapping someone else's work up in a donation and ad-banner that take up half-a-screen without so much a as a by-your-leave is fine.

If it's about saving content owners then you can simply announce "all content owners wishing their content to be retained on reocities contact us by December 2015; content we don't have a license to use will be removed at that date". You can even keep an offline copy of the archive if you're in to historic preservation. Even better, if you cared at all about not infringing on peoples copyright would be to have the content available and put it up at owners request - or if a fair use argument for a particular piece of content was made.

I've said it before - you're well off the mark both morally and legally with this one I'm afraid.