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Negative SEO Does Exist

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Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#101

Post by Dylan16807 »

jacquesm wrote: post #58
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…

I like your thought experiment. Check out elsewhere in this thread how it works in real life. Thought experiments are great when they can teach you a new insight about how something actually works (for instance, Einstein and the elevator), but when they describe an alternate reality then they are less useful. If you have a problem with signs near an intersection you petition the city council without touching the sign…

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.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#102

Post by [deleted] »

rplnt wrote: post #69
logicallee wrote: post #44

I think there's a very good argument to be made that negative SEO should be illegal, with punishment/compensation similar to that of slander and libel in the United States. (Which are incredibly specific, due to free speech issues.) Why should slander and libel be illegal at all - why can't anyone say, claim, or publish anything they want whatsoever? If you reflect on that the reason is fairly obvious. Likewise, if n…

You can have that law in US.. and then what? It might help in some cases, but people doing this probably aren't that stupid and would use foreign entity to do the dirty work if there was such law in effect.

[deleted]

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#103

Post by jacquesm »

lmm wrote: post #94
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…

> 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 without all this crap.

Theory: when a new dominant search engine emerges ways will be found to game it to such an extent that the damage to the web offsets any gains from the increased ability to find content.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#104

Post by aetherson »

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…

I guess the frustrating difference is:

Suppose that the natural situation, with no SEO at all, is that you have the #1 site on some keyword, and your competitor has a lower ranking.

With "positive" SEO, okay, your competitor might have paid a lot of money and bumped you to the #2 site, and that might be frustrating -- but you're still #2!

With "negative" SEO, your competitor pays a lot of money and now you're #100. And that sucks more for you.

Probably not important in the really big keywords where all the top sites have always paid big money for SEO -- then, sure, it's all just relative. But in the relative backwaters where lots of sites aren't engaging in SEO at all, having negative techniques work is a lot more frustrating to the people who just don't want to play the game.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#105

Post by scott_s »

matnewton85 wrote: post #40
andrenotgiant wrote: post #6

I think you need to break your argument into two parts. 1. People ARE creating spammy links that point to competitor sites in the hopes of damaging their search rankings. - You have proven this. 2. As a result of a competitor creating spammy links to your site, your rankings in Google have been permanently negatively effected. - I don't think the data you present is sufficient to prove this. Correlation does not equa…

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…

The exchange, paraphrased:

andrenotgiant: I am unfamiliar with this area, so I need evidence to convince me that this technique makes a difference.

matnewton85: I am personally familiar with this area, and my personal experience says that this technique works.

So, the answer to your question is: because your personal experience does not qualify as evidence to someone else.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#106

Post by jacquesm »

vectorpush wrote: post #93
jacquesm wrote: post #88

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? If someone copies your content, go after them, sue them if you have to and out them. Make sure that they realize that if they copy your content that it will hurt. I have absolutely no idea what if any backlinks I have to my blog, nor could I care less about it. People will read it, or mayb…

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 position of a competitor or even Google.

Of course it could happen to anybody. That is the one reason why you should never ever run a business that is dependent on a single source for customers. If you do that you don't have a business at all, just an extension of the ecosystem owned by someone else at whose whim you live or die.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#107

Post by jacquesm »

SquareWheel wrote: post #98
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…

>If you feel SEO can do good show me an example where an SEO achieved value creation rather than shifting around a percentage in some zero sum game. Your generalizations are really quite misguided. SEOs achieve value when they optimize sites to fit Google's guidelines, which as it happens also benefits humans. Converting Flash sites to HTML, reorganizing the URL structure to convert ?articleid=5 to /my-great-article/…

No, that does not create value. It creates the impression of creating value, but in actual fact the same number of $ are spent online so the only thing that changes is where the money is spent. Value creation is a way to get out of the zero sum game.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#108

Post by Dylan16807 »

qeorge wrote: post #77
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…

The problem is that in this case, "putting a red flag on [a website]" means creating 10s or 100s of thousands of spam blog comments on random websites. Abusing your metaphor further: it would be more like spray painting the phone number of the shady business on every house in town. Certainly the officials would have to notice them then, thanks to your good works! Too bad for the home owners though...

The spam-filled sites in the article were owned by the person performing SEO. No third parties need to be spammed.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#109

Post by DontBeADick »

jacquesm wrote: post #88
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…

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? If someone copies your content, go after them, sue them if you have to and out them. Make sure that they realize that if they copy your content that it will hurt. I have absolutely no idea what if any backlinks I have to my blog, nor could I care less about it. People will read it, or mayb…

Are you really trying to pretend that you don't care if people read your blog even though you link to it here all the time?

If there were an olympic event for mental gymnastics, you'd be dominating right now.

Re: Negative SEO Does Exist

#110

Post by jacquesm »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #101
jacquesm wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your thought experiment. Check out elsewhere in this thread how it works in real life. Thought experiments are great when they can teach you a new insight about how something actually works (for instance, Einstein and the elevator), but when they describe an alternate reality then they are less useful. If you have a problem with signs near an intersection you petition the city council without touching the sign…

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.

> There is no direct attacking going on.

I don't think we're going to agree on this.

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