How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit • Hacker News Board

Re: How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

#41

Post by diminoten » Mon, Feb 24, 2014, 9:54 PM UTC

sharkweek wrote: post #25

leephillips wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other side of this coin is that spammers can buy pagerank by purchasing a reputable domain and then using it for spam. That, it turns out, it what happened here (according to a Google engineer who explained after I published this): http://lee-phillips.org/hitchYellowPages/

Yep - not uncommon for spammers to create powerful link networks by buying up a bunch of quality domains, and then spamming links at what they want to rank for. It normally takes Google a few weeks/months to catch this stuff, so for super competitive terms, it's easy to make it worthwhile by ranking for something like "fast payday loans." Then when the domain gets penalized, rinse/repeating. Someone teased Matt Cutts…

It consistently blows my mind how effective spamming actually is, given how much money, effort, and time spammers are willing to throw around.

Re: How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

#42

Post by danielweber » Mon, Feb 24, 2014, 9:55 PM UTC

puranjay wrote: post #23

trevin wrote: post #14

This is what happens when Google actively penalizes sites for something that is totally out of their control (links pointing to their site). Granted, a large chunk of spammers know exactly what they are doing when they blast 1000s of links into a site, but what about the average webmaster? Or the small business owner who knows nothing about SEO and relies on a cheap "SEO firm"? Or somebody who isn't an SEO expert buy…

Negative SEO is a very real thing. You can buy links off black hat forums that are specifically advertised to help knock off your competition. It's the same with other social media as well. Want to get one of your competitor's fledgling Facebook pages banned? A service will spam out the page link in FB comments for a few dollars. Then when the FB mods come calling, the onus of proving innocence becomes your responsib…

It was one of the first casualties of the anti-spam wars. Completely uninvolved people found themselves on the wrong end of this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job

Re: How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

#43

Post by SteveGerencser » Mon, Feb 24, 2014, 10:23 PM UTC

unreal37 wrote: post #10

My friend, I sympathize with you. But surely you can email those webmasters in at most 30-45 minutes with requests to remove those links, give it a week, and then do the disavow tool? Is it not worth it to spend 2 hours to rescue your site that you care so much about? RapGenius was able to do this in a few hours and they had THOUSANDS of bad backlinks. They even published their source code for automating it. You gott…

If those links point to pages that do not exist because they were part of the previous owner's website, why should he have to hunt down each instance of an old link and ask to have it removed? Never mind the fact that we are seeing as much as 80% ignore rate on removal requests these days.

We are seeing more an more of this. I've seen messages from 'Google' with sample links that need to be removed that are from domains that no longer exist. How can you remove a link the Google claims is causing you harm when that domain no longer exists?

The best solution has always been for Google to simply ignore links that it does not approve of and move on. Instead they have chosen the path of penalizing many websites in an effort to 'clean up' a problem that they were instrumental in creating (PR Toolbar anyone?). The collateral damage tends to be irrelevant to many at Google because search tends to be considered a zero sum game. When one site moves down another moves up.

Re: How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

#44

Post by atourgates » Mon, Feb 24, 2014, 10:25 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #15

At the same time the real concern for legitimate businesses is the potential for adversaries to use massive spam backlinking to destroy your online presence. Are Google algo's smart enough to not ding you for what you did not do? Probably not. It would almost be trivially easy to destroy a domain this way.

I was sitting in a meeting just the other week where this came up. We were giving our spiel about how there aren't really any shortcuts that work long-term with SEO, and if you pay someone $20 to create 1,000s of spammy backlinks, Google will notice and you'll be severely penalized for it.

So the CEO of the company pipes up and says, "What's to stop me from paying $20 to have someone to create 1,000s of spammy back-links to our competitor's site?"

I'm shocked that this hasn't become a more common or publicized tactic. I can't imagine how you'd trace it, and the way things are right now, all the burden of proof and cleanup is on the site owner.

They could certainly disavow the links, but it seems like you could pretty easily and cheaply become a pain in the ass of just about any small to medium site on the internet.

Re: How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

#45

Post by saraid216 » Mon, Feb 24, 2014, 10:30 PM UTC

diminoten wrote: post #41

sharkweek wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep - not uncommon for spammers to create powerful link networks by buying up a bunch of quality domains, and then spamming links at what they want to rank for. It normally takes Google a few weeks/months to catch this stuff, so for super competitive terms, it's easy to make it worthwhile by ranking for something like "fast payday loans." Then when the domain gets penalized, rinse/repeating. Someone teased Matt Cutts…

It consistently blows my mind how effective spamming actually is, given how much money, effort, and time spammers are willing to throw around.

It's easily one of the best illustrations of how naturally skewed our worldviews are.

Re: How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

#46

Post by kevingadd » Mon, Feb 24, 2014, 11:48 PM UTC

jgmmo wrote: post #2

You didn't do your research. Your domain had a spam history. Also, a simple backlink analysis from any SEO would have turned up these issues and then you could have promptly disavowed them and be done with it. It's not Google's fault that you didn't dot you i's and cross your t's as a webmaster.

How does an unmaintained phpBB install count as a 'spam history'? By that metric probably half the amateur websites on the internet are 'spam websites' because they have a forum that isn't actively maintained. I run across spambot-afflicted forums on a regular basis.

Re: How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

#47

Post by GoodIntentions » Tue, Feb 25, 2014, 12:32 AM UTC

atourgates wrote: post #44

robomartin wrote: post #15

At the same time the real concern for legitimate businesses is the potential for adversaries to use massive spam backlinking to destroy your online presence. Are Google algo's smart enough to not ding you for what you did not do? Probably not. It would almost be trivially easy to destroy a domain this way.

I was sitting in a meeting just the other week where this came up. We were giving our spiel about how there aren't really any shortcuts that work long-term with SEO, and if you pay someone $20 to create 1,000s of spammy backlinks, Google will notice and you'll be severely penalized for it. So the CEO of the company pipes up and says, "What's to stop me from paying $20 to have someone to create 1,000s of spammy back-l…

I saw this technique proposed on a webmaster's forum many years ago. If google hasn't given some thought to detecting this type of manipulation, I'd be surprised. If they've actually figured out how to reliably detect and discount it, I'd be doubly surprised.

Re: How Google Nuked Sports Media Watch For A Crime It Did Not Commit

#48

Post by robomartin » Tue, Feb 25, 2014, 6:57 PM UTC

atourgates wrote: post #44

robomartin wrote: post #15

At the same time the real concern for legitimate businesses is the potential for adversaries to use massive spam backlinking to destroy your online presence. Are Google algo's smart enough to not ding you for what you did not do? Probably not. It would almost be trivially easy to destroy a domain this way.

I was sitting in a meeting just the other week where this came up. We were giving our spiel about how there aren't really any shortcuts that work long-term with SEO, and if you pay someone $20 to create 1,000s of spammy backlinks, Google will notice and you'll be severely penalized for it. So the CEO of the company pipes up and says, "What's to stop me from paying $20 to have someone to create 1,000s of spammy back-l…

In the real world business can be war. I have personally experienced a major competitor bribing my top resellers to not feature my product at major tradeshows (a friend on the inside showed me the emails). I've also had a major multinational attempt to keep me off my own booth at a trade show by filing a false temporary restraining order against me (thrown out by a judge who got amazingly angry at the attorney and corporate rep for misusing the law). They did this because I was absolutely kicking their ass with better technology and I was very vocal about it (I was stupid).

Anyhow, my point is that if you don't do it there's always a chance they will do it to you. That's the main reason to still play the patent game: protection from bad actors.

Spending $20 per month to destroy your competitor's inbound lead generation channel would be brilliant and very effective. Is it ethical? I'll let philosophy majors deal with that. Until you've been the subject of truly underhanded business tactics by an adversary far more financially poweful than you could ever be you don't really understand the dark side of the business world.

The only reason I would not tend to do something like this is that it could have pretty serious legal implications. IANAL yet I can imagine a potential twist that could turn something like that into a defamation lawsuit or worst. A small company would be really foolish to even attempt this. A large corporation, on the other hand, has the resources to make this sort if thing happen and avoid being connected to it.