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Confessions of a Google Spammer (2015)

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Re: Confessions of a Google Spammer (2015)

#21

Post by gscott »

rackforms wrote: post #11

Apologies for the long posts chaps, but here's a genuine riddle I'm hoping someone with black hat SEO experience/knowledge can help answer for me: A quick spot of history: I started my business in 2007. Organic traffic grew steadily until 2012 when I suffered a Penguin penalty that promptly wiped me off the map. Until that point I had reached a steady 1 or 2 spot in organic rankings for the keywords that exactly desc…

If you have not recovered in two years then there is something wrong. Even manual penalties should fall off around then. You may have to get a new domain name. Your content can be moved over to it.

Re: Confessions of a Google Spammer (2015)

#22

Post by gscott »

antitamper wrote: post #2

Google is only a proxy to The Internet, nothing more. There's a bucketload of untapped traffic coming from sources Google could only dream of. I found this out by mistake when I had AWStats running for way longer than it should have, and it hoovered up globs of what we would call 'big data' today. Some of the referal links are still alive today and funneling terrabytes of metadata through their servers; a practice I…

Google has been trying to put a damper on linking from your website to another one for years now. My first website in 1996 I developed the first thing I did was go to websites that had similar customers and we would exchange links so our customers would find out about our complimentary services. Now that freaks google out because they prefer everyone to see Google ads when searching so finding websites must be done inside of Google otherwise they threaten you to take you out of Google search.

Re: Confessions of a Google Spammer (2015)

#23

Post by MicroBerto »

rackforms wrote: post #11

Apologies for the long posts chaps, but here's a genuine riddle I'm hoping someone with black hat SEO experience/knowledge can help answer for me: A quick spot of history: I started my business in 2007. Organic traffic grew steadily until 2012 when I suffered a Penguin penalty that promptly wiped me off the map. Until that point I had reached a steady 1 or 2 spot in organic rankings for the keywords that exactly desc…

My thoughts are that the spammers were backlinking their backlinks.

You had blog comments open for a bit, so they got a successful comment link from your site/domain to their crappy handbag site.

THEN, to give their links more "power", they sent low-quality spam links to your domain.

That or negative SEO, as suggested.

Either way, petitioning Google for reconsideration and doing lots of disavow'ing until you're blue in the face could be worth it.

Re: Confessions of a Google Spammer (2015)

#24

Post by dragonbonheur »

stordoff wrote: post #20
rackforms wrote: post #11

Apologies for the long posts chaps, but here's a genuine riddle I'm hoping someone with black hat SEO experience/knowledge can help answer for me: A quick spot of history: I started my business in 2007. Organic traffic grew steadily until 2012 when I suffered a Penguin penalty that promptly wiped me off the map. Until that point I had reached a steady 1 or 2 spot in organic rankings for the keywords that exactly desc…

Somewhat related, can anyone explain this Twitter account[1] to me? I stumbled across it about a week ago. It appears to be a bot that copied some of my (and others') HN posts to an external site (with a link back to HN), and then tweeted about it from an account claiming to be about the 'flu. It doesn't really bother me; I'm just not sure what it is trying to achieve. [1] https://twitter.com/FluViruses/status/698733…

It's trying to get their twitter profile (which contains a link to their site) ranked by using links from HN posts which contains links to other sites even though the context of the links differ It would have been smarter to repost links and RSS feeds of medical blogs...

Re: Confessions of a Google Spammer (2015)

#25

Post by trukernels »

arca_vorago wrote: post #15
gorhill wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Block `twimg.com` and see the count climbing to over 460 -- because of the avatars in the comment section. Personally I block such ubiquitous hostnames by default (using uBO's dynamic filtering), as they are as good as trackers (for Twitter in the current case).

Lots of people install ublock but never look at the settings or enable dynamic filtering. Thats probably why you get more than them.

Ironically, the guy you replied to is the developer behind Ublock. He's the person who knows the !most about internet privacy in Canada.

Re: Confessions of a Google Spammer (2015)

#26

Post by rackforms »

nstory wrote: post #12
rackforms wrote: post #11

Apologies for the long posts chaps, but here's a genuine riddle I'm hoping someone with black hat SEO experience/knowledge can help answer for me: A quick spot of history: I started my business in 2007. Organic traffic grew steadily until 2012 when I suffered a Penguin penalty that promptly wiped me off the map. Until that point I had reached a steady 1 or 2 spot in organic rankings for the keywords that exactly desc…

I am not a black hat SEO expert by any means, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt. It sounds like you may have been the victim of a negative SEO attack. In short: one of your competitors may have created these millions of spammy links in order to decrease your rankings (and, presumably, raise their own closer to the top). If this is still a site you care about, consider disavowing the spammy links: https://suppo…

A very solid piece of advice on the disavow links, and very much acted upon a few years ago (of course I still maintain a close watch on links!)

Also, to another reply a bit further down, I actually started fresh with a new domain about 6 months after the initial penalty, and used 301 redirects from the old (penalized) site to the new.

I did this to reduce confusion from my existing users, as their was no reason why they should have to retype or bookmark a new domain name. Sure I was going through a very rough patch, but my users should not have to as well!

I had a simple bit of logic that said if you were coming from the old domain, to pop up a message say hi, we had a name change. Not ideal, but that's the best I could come up with.

Little did I know that the 301 actually transferred the penalty to the new site. Shortly after launching I was hit with a second penalty, and the thought of having to change domain names again was just...it's just wrong. The inconvenience and confusion this creates for users is still being felt to this day. I routinely get emails from users of the first domain asking if I'm the same company.

So yeah, I've been trying here, but my lucks been pretty bad : )

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